J.M.Coetzee, Disgrace (Secker & Warburg, 1999)
The adjective most commonly applied to J.M.Coetzee's writing is "spare". An early review of Disgrace, his 1999 Booker Prize winner, in The Guardian said that the novel's style was as spare as the South African environment it depicts. While there is a certain truth in that, it seems to me that the idea that "Coetzee = spare = South Africa" requires some explanation.
The whole notion of "spareness", to begin with, is one that needs clarification. It could very easily be argued that, if "spare" is to be taken as referring to a prose style pared to the limit so that every word thrums with exaggerated significance, Coetzee is not particularly "spare". Compared to Carver, Borges or even Hemingway, he is positively verbose. His style, to be sure, is a million miles from the lushness of Rushdie, Marquez or Ondaatje, but it is hardly syntactical bare bones.
The issue is further clouded by our modern notions of what good "style" is. As James Wood has pointed out, our late twentieth-century love of the unpretentious has led to a lionisation of the mediocre. Take a bow, Tom Wolfe. Salute your fans, John Irving. Come on down, Beryl Bainbridge. And just fuck off, Jack Kerouac. Which is not to say that literary novels have to be heavily stylised, or full of the linguistic elan of, say, Martin Amis. It may well be the case, indeed, that the term "novel" is simply too broadly applied to be useful. What makes Beckett's Trilogy great is exactly the opposite of what makes, say, Dickens, great: to compare the two on the same playing field is absurd. But that is a digression. Kerouac is still crap.
There lingers a suspicion that to attempt the lyrical is to take a risk, and that makes the comparatively small percentage of lyrical books that do work all the more laudable. Rushdie, to my mind, succeeds in Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, but fails awfully in The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which descends almost into self-parody. One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are magnificent, but I defy anyone to enjoy the molassic prose of Marquez's The General in his Labyrinth. And Ondaatje, who gets it just right in In the Skin of A Lion, over-eggs his pudding in The English Patient, despite its Booker, and even more so in Anil's Ghost.
But at least they try, which sets them above the vast swathe of writers who never aim beyond competence, and who never look beyond their bank balance.
Not that I'm suggesting that Coetzee is one of those. On the contrary, Disgrace is subtly lyrical, written with a quiet and wry voice perfectly suited to expressing the dilemmas facing an aging white teacher of Romantic poetry in South Africa. It is, almost certainly, a great book.
David Lurie, twice-divorced, satisfies his sexual urges with a prostitute. When his relationship with her breaks up, he engages in a brief affair with one of his students at the Technical University of Cape Town. He doesn't treat her particularly badly, it could hardly be said he coerced her, but she, under pressure from her family and wacko boyfriend, reports him to university authorities, and he resigns. Lurie then moves to the veldt to stay with his lesbian daughter, who runs a farm. There they are attacked by three blacks, and, as the dust settles, Lurie's relationship with his daughter disintegrates.
Justin Cartwright, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said that "Coetzee captures with appalling skill the white dilemma in South Africa." That may be true, but Disgrace is far more than that. It is about the struggle and guilt of those once dominant groups in society -- whites, males, heterosexuals -- to cope with a changing world order.
Lurie's case is heard by a university committee. It is made up largely of his colleagues -- that is, other literature tutors and lecturers. Most are sympathetic, but he is violently attacked by a near-hysterical feminist. She is irrational and illogical, but, because of the seed of historical truth that lies buried somewhere beneath the virulent foliage of her argument, and because she won't let him speak, Lurie refuses to offer any but the most perfunctory of defences. His silence is eloquent, almost heroic, and it condemns him utterly.
The portrait is not subtle, but it rings true. Lurie has gone against the unwritten rules of his profession, but, in the very place where liberalism should flourish -- a university arts faculty -- ideological zealotry, the counter-patriarchy unleashed by liberalism, strikes him down. Later, Lurie's daughter's passivity after the farm has been attacked presents the flip side of the same phenomenon: the guilt of the former oppressors in the face of violence -- verbal, ideological, physical and sexual -- from the once-oppressed.
What makes Disgrace great, however, is that there are no easy answers. That one group of people once oppressed another gives the latter no right to oppress back. So much is easy; but Lurie is not a particularly pleasant man. He isn't evil, but he will tread on toes to get what he wants. He makes mistakes, and he suffers for them, and we sympathise with him because he is less bad than the forces ranged against him.
That makes Disgrace sound a very bleak book, and, in many ways it is. Which brings us back to the supposed spareness of the prose. The mild lyricism of Disgrace, I would argue, expresses not so much a sense of South Africa's spareness, but rather Lurie's own struggle -- filtered through the Romantic poetry he teaches -- to adapt to modern life and values, a problem set, but not rooted, in South Africa.
