J. M. Coetzee is among the most deserving of Nobel winners, a writer who shows what fiction can do, writes Eileen Battersby.
Perhaps more philosopher than storyteller, the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, this year's Nobel laureate in literature, who receives his prize today, is one of the world's finest novelists - and among the award's most deserving recipients.
Possessed of a rare, eloquent rage and a formidable critical intellect, as well as an unusually graceful, lyric prose style, he has been relentless in his austere pursuit of personal and public truth. His work is powerful, beautiful, sophisticated and at times terrifying. At 63, he seems to have suddenly become ancient, while also remaining ageless, and is a laureate likely to produce further masterpieces.
Few artists understand human fear, anger and failure as well as he does. The questions he asks seek to provoke and do. Although the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature has often carried a political emphasis, Coetzee the writer has been both artist and prophet. Central to his impressive body of work is the thesis that the novel form should question the worth of fiction as art. Nowhere has he asked that more forcefully than in his most recent novel, the daring, strange though ultimately disappointing Elizabeth Costello, published earlier this year.
Yet to fully appreciate that book, a study of personal, intellectual and artistic uncertainty that sets out to explode conventional notions of fiction through the experiences of an elderly female novelist, it must be placed in the context of his previous eight novels, which span 30 years of his life and that of South Africa's political evolution. There is also the fact that Elizabeth Costello closely echoes a non-fiction work, The Lives Of Animals, based on his Princeton University lecture series. Nothing is routinely easy with Coetzee.
Since the publication of his first fiction, Dusklands, in 1974, he has merged polemic and myth in narratives of subtlety and pain invariably graced by the spirit of Kafka, his literary mentor.
Interestingly for a major South African writer, Coetzee's career truly began in his own country. His second and third books, In The Heart Of The Country (1977) and Waiting For The Barbarians (1980), which both won the CNA Prize, were published in Britain in 1982, the year before he became internationally famous for Life & Times Of Michael K, which won the 1983 Booker Prize, the first great novel to do so. It alerted the world to the genius of Coetzee. An allegorical variation of The Pilgrim's Progress, it tells the story of Michael, Coetzee's most passive character. He is a simple gardener who loses his job in the turmoil that explodes around him. An apolitical, non-heroic Everyman, he is engaged in an odyssey in an extraordinary narrative that is both apolitical and political parable. There is, unusually for Coetzee, no anger.
The theme is survival: "He, Michael K., would produce a teaspoon from his pocket, a teaspoon and a long roll of string. He would clear the rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he would bend the handle of the teaspoon in a loop and tie the string to it, he would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he bought it up, there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one can live."
For Coetzee, the plight of the individual is all. It is also true of himself. Here is the artist in isolation. He has always stood apart. A tense, remote, quiet man, haunted and watchful. The rugby- and cricket-loving professor who could not engage with his students. He is famously slow to answer a question, and in company he frequently remains silent. In 1995, when I interviewed him, it was correct to note at the time that, whereas other leading South African writers, such as Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach, had been politically active, with Breytenbach in particular suffering for his political beliefs, Coetzee appeared curiously protected. A career academic, having made the transition from mathematics to linguistics to literature, he retreated to a tower, the University of Cape Town, to teach, to write, to think.
His fellow South African writers had shared the honour of having books banned; for Coetzee, aside from a poem, nothing was censored. It is easy to explain: his literary approach to politics was less direct, his art more subtle; he was looking at life above and beyond politics. Coetzee's characters - such as the contradictory Magda, frantically making sense of the horrors, "in a house shaped by destiny like a H . . . in a theatre of stone and sun fenced in with miles of wire", in In The Heart Of The Country or Susan Barton in Foe (1986), Coetzee's reworking of Robinson Crusoe - were on a mission to find themselves. Well, everything changes.
As the rest of the literary world celebrated Coetzee's magnificent eighth novel, Disgrace - which also won him his second Booker Prize, making him the first writer to achieve this double - attitudes at home chilled. The ANC was unprepared to accept his portrait of a bleak and ugly post-apartheid South Africa. Central to the outrage was a sequence in which the farming daughter of the central character, David Lurie, a disgraced university professor, is gang-raped by black men and white farmers are violently evicted from their land by squatters. This is not the postcard picture of the new South Africa cultivated by the ANC. Following his denouncement, Coetzee, for so long regretful at not having suffered, became a belated victim of official disapproval - and from a previously benign source. He emigrated to Australia in 2001.
Coetzee has never filled the role of writer as public man. He was born in a Cape Town maternity hospital in February 1940. English would be, and remains, his first language, although he speaks Afrikaans and translates work from the Dutch. His father's family came from Afrikaner sheep-farming stock, his mother's from Germany. Until the age of 12, the young Coetzee spent his childhood in small rural towns. His father was weak, his mother suffocatingly affectionate. Coetzee set out to flee both. A vivid sense of his lonely early life is to be found in his memoir Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life - which reads like a novel and is, fittingly, written in the third person - and Youth (2002), long-listed for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a novel that draws on his unhappy stint in 1960s London and reads as a blistering account of the angry artist in waiting.
Within that anger lies enormous humanity. Among his many fine novels - and this is the problem with Coetzee: his work is so good - is The Master Of Petersburg (1994), winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. While Disgrace is a powerful portrait of a once sexually arrogant man suffering humiliation after a charge of sexual harassment, The Master Of Petersburg is a rewriting of an episode from the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1860, it is a brilliant, atmospheric performance complete with shades of Dostoevsky's chaos, psychological turmoil and frenetic comedy. In it, the then middle-aged Russian novelist, haunted by his own multilayered guilt, returns from exile to St Petersburg to investigate the sudden death of his stepson. The Dostoevsky character thinks of himself as "the one who is dead, or rather, I died but my death failed to arrive". Attempting to piece together any artist's life from his work is folly, but Coetzee's son was killed in a fall. A sense of personal loss hangs over the novel.
In another wonderful performance, Age Of Iron (1990), retired classics teacher Elizabeth Curren, a bluntly caustic and wholly sympathetic character, returns home on the day she learnt she is dying of cancer. In the alley by the side of her garage she finds a man lying asleep in a shelter, "a house of carton boxes and plastic sheeting". Curren is another parent mourning the loss of her child, an estranged daughter, now living in the US. Set in the 1980s, the darkest decade in the history of a despairing country, the novel triumphs through the logic of Elizabeth. She sees South Africa as "a bad tempered old hound snoozing in the doorway, taking its time to die".
As most interviewers have discovered, Coetzee does not speak readily about his country in a personal way, nor does he define his position as an African or South African writer. He does place importance on the fact that, regardless of his father's pure Afrikaner's credentials, "no Afrikaner would consider me an Afrikaner". Everything leads back to his personal experience of isolation and his wider understanding of it. In Waiting For The Barbarians, the Magistrate, after a series of outrages, reflects on his situation. "I wanted to live outside history. I wanted to live outside the history that empire imposes on its subjects, even its lost subjects." He could be articulating Coetzee's personal detachment.
Any article about Coetzee could stand on merely describing the wonderful fiction, and wonderful it is. Even a book as odd as Elizabeth Costello, which lacks his characteristic subtle bends and instead reads as a confrontational intellectual engagement with the role of the artist and the failure of art in the face of history, is fascinating. His sly humour is more evident in his literary criticism than it is in his fiction. Stranger Shores, a volume of essays written between 1986 and 1999, shows how fine a critic he is. Particularly impressive is his analysis of Richardson's Clarissa and his argument about the difficulties of translating Kafka.
Less autocratic than Gordimer, his fellow South African literature laureate, the reticent Coetzee is more enigmatic and a greater artist. To see him being honoured within three years of Günter Grass, another prophet from the margins, makes the prize a shrewd endorsement of merit, not merely a worthy international gesture. It may well be that had W. G. Sebald survived, he may have beaten Coetzee to the prize a year or two earlier. But it was as if preordained. John Maxwell Coetzee as laureate. The writer who explores the power of sexuality and politics, who has always denied having a philosophy of fiction, can claim a philosophy of art and life. He has shown us what fiction can do and how it can make us think. This is why he is being so deservedly honoured.
