A twice-divorced Cape Town university professor's long career as a womaniser finally ends in dismissal and public humiliation. From a relatively ordinary event which is described with clinical exactness, one of the world's most gifted living novelists has shaped a powerful narrative of breathtaking genius which examines the concept of power in several of its many guises: the individual, sexual, parental and political. The self-contained David Lurie - "intense . . . never passionate" - is not particularly likeable. By his own admission, he is cold, selfish and best suited to living life at a remove, because he is a failure as a companion and, at best, an anxious shadow as a father. "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."
His weekly sessions with a beautiful prostitute, classified as "exotic" by the discreet agency she works for, satisfy him. A year of such meetings have left him content and uncomplicatedly fond of her. But all this changes when he innocently invades her other life, the real one, by unexpectedly seeing her as she shops with her two small sons. She spots him, and glances are exchanged which "he regrets at once". This sighting not only destroys their sense of intimacy - it ends their arrangement, and forces Lurie to concede that others are equally capable of living on several emotional levels. He is a man who knows himself well - or, at least, thinks he does. Aside from the mechanics of sex, he certainly lives in his head, and is interested in Byron, about whom he intends to write. He is also aware of getting older and can no longer take his appeal for granted. Previously "he could always count on his magnetism. If he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, she would return his look, he could rely on that. That was how he lived; for years, for decades, that was the backbone of his life. Then one day it all ended. Without warning his powers fled."
Coetzee has no difficulty in presenting his central character as an intelligently convincing mix of scholarship and increasingly vulnerable male vanity. Lurie is a thinker, who in relationships dwells only on surfaces. Most of this third-person narrative unfolds in the present tense, which adds a heightened urgency to a story about a central character whose life, until now, has always been directed with immense deliberation. Lurie's downfall is so simple, indeed cliched, as to be almost comical. On discovering that his pleasing prostitute resents his intrusion, reduces him to the status of paying client and soon refuses to see him, he quickly seeks a replacement and finds a likely candidate among his students. The cool scholar woos the girl, whom he realises "is not just thirty years his junior: she is a student, his student, under his tutelage". The recklessness with which Lurie conducts the pursuit is brilliantly handled by Coetzee, who succeeds in conveying the professor's abandon as well as his awareness of the dangers. In a particularly shocking passage - which on one level is subtle and almost dream-like, on another executed with alarming clarity - Lurie forces himself on his love object and while doing so is struck by her passivity. "She does not resist. All she does is avert herself: avert her lips, avert her eyes . . . Not rape, not quite that, but undesired . . . As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck."
The differences between the two lovers are clearly outlined - his desperation, her disengaged curiosity. Such is Coetzee's skill that all it takes is a few lines of dialogue. Always an artist (few contemporary novelists use language as beautifully), he is also a master technician with a chilling ability to arrive at the heart of a character's motives, and invariably the most intense psychological states are explored, or rather exposed, with dazzling understatement - as illustrated so well by Elizabeth Curren, the wry, engaging, tough and terminally-ill narrator of Age of Iron (1990).
Since winning the 1983 Booker prize for his beautiful parable, The Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee - who suggested as early as Dusklands and Waiting for the Barbarians that he was special - has consistently changed direction. Always brilliant, his work is also unpredictable and elusive. Even at its most direct, it is highly imaginative, and there invariably remains an element of mystery which explains why he is so superior to other novelists. Consider the essential ambiguity of the central character's dilemma in In the Heart of the Country - is she an agonised witness, or is she insane?
With Foe (1986), Coetzee produced a daring variation of Robinson Crusoe, while The Master of Petersburg (1994), inspired by the life of Dostoyevsky, looked at the tensions of a writer and also of a father. The role of ambiguity in Coetzee's work is hardly surprising. His austere but atmospheric memoir Boyhood is more novel than autobiography.
Disgrace develops into a multi-dimensional portrait of one man's fall from privilege and of how this descent brings him to a host of discoveries. A refusal to comply with the university authorities decides Lurie's fate. Forced to resign, he leaves town and travels to his daughter's small-holding. There he experiences power and fear at their most naked. Again the characterisation of Lucy, Lurie's only child, now grown and a self-sufficient flower farmer and boarding kennel owner, is outstanding. She becomes increasingly vulnerable in the new order and, above all, is another of Coetzee's lost children. Never one to sentimentalise the situation in South Africa, Coetzee confronts the new brutalities and makes inspired use of the plight of helpless dogs as a metaphor for a strange, barbaric society.
THIS is a work of immense artistry, and Coetzee's authorial detachment is also unnervingly intense. Lurie arrives at an extraordinary self-understanding which is fatalistic and accepting. The quality of the writing matches the weight of the perceptions. As a study of one man's lonely journey to knowledge it is remarkable. David Lurie, in becoming a person, is first dismantled and learns about the dignity of others through respecting the rights of discarded dogs.
Throughout his career, Coetzee, the most politically detached of the major South African writers, has consistently explored the business of being human with a poet's vision, while always being alert to the society in which he lives. Disgrace is an inspired, beautiful, savage book from a writer whose graceful and profound fictions continue to be sustained by his subtle sense of outrage. In a year which sees the Booker Prize apparently reduced to a tussle between Rushdie and Seth, with A.L. Kennedy representing the home challenge, Coetzee's latest masterwork simply towers above anything else.
Eileen Battersby is an Irish Times journalist
