BOOKS

A comprehension of life

SUSAN RAM

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; Secker & Warburg, 1999; pages 220, £14.99, special Indian price Rs.590.50.

IT is, perhaps, coincidental that the final Booker Prize of our century should go to a South African writer. But as you read Disgrace, J.M.Coetzee's eighth novel and his second to win the prestigious literary award, you become aware of a certain b leak appropriateness. It is not so much that South Africa, with its rare physical beauty, mineral bounty and human diversity, is poised to enter the new millennium weighed down by its grim, oppressive past. In political terms, there has been, if not a re volution, then a partial overturning of the old order. Apartheid, the dominant reality of South Africa's twentieth century, has been dismantled. The formal structures of a modern democracy have been put in place. Innovative efforts have been made, throug h the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to come to terms with the past. But all this seems overwhelmed by a continuing sense of tragedy. As the stories come out of South Africa - stories of unemployment at epidemic levels, rising crime, lives blighted by Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), defeated expectations - the realisation grows that the process of reckoning has only just begun.

Coetzee's new novel is essentially an engagement with the anguish and the mayhem that stalk contemporary South Africa. But where another writer might have been tempted to assay the grand scale, mounting a broad sweep through a society in crisis and produ cing a blockbuster, Coetzee adheres to a modest canvas. Herein lies his effectiveness. Through his small, spare story, with its unheroic central character and its encounter with violence that, by prevailing South African standards, can be deemed a brush, he unlocks a stash of themes and issues.

With a rape at the centre of the narrative, there is an exploration of the act of rape along its personal, political and other dimensions. Growing old, understood not simply as a process of physical diminution and decay but as a loss of identity and bein g, is a running theme. There is attention to language, especially relevant in a culture of many languages, most of them traditionally held in contempt by white South Africa, and to the associated challenge of communication in new times. Above all, Coetze e engages with difficult areas of human experience: confession of wrongdoing, atonement, forgiveness, the path back from purgatory to something like a state of grace.

COETZEE, a professor of literature at the University of Cape Town, draws the central figure of his novel from the academic world of the southern Cape. David Lurie, a white South African of English descent, is a university teacher for whom the certainties of life - a cloistered existence among the Romantic poets, a succession of women won over by his wit and boyish good looks - are in visible retreat. Leisurely literary pursuits stand uprooted in the new South Africa; David now teaches courses in communi cations skills, in the company of colleagues who are similar relics of the past, 'clerks in a post-religious age'. More damaging still to his sense of being is the awareness that his attractiveness to women is dwindling. As a womaniser once confident tha t 'if he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain intent, she would return his look', he experiences growing old (he is now 52) as losing 'the backbone of his life'.

David's response is a classic instance of mid-life male recklessness: he seduces one of his students. The one-sided affair quickly sours, exposure follows, and he finds himself before a university enquiry facing charges of sexual harassment. In the new S outh Africa, sensitivity to such issues is part of a larger human rights agenda, but David, locked in the past and incapable of frank self-exploration, reacts with disdain: while ready to plead guilty as charged, he will not issue the public statement of confession and remorse ('abasement' is how he sees it) that will save his job. Banished from the university, he now steps out into realities - geographic, social, racial, political - for which nothing in his years of sheltered, privileged self-preoccupa tion has prepared him.

With two broken marriages behind him, David has no partner to help him through the crisis. He therefore turns to his daughter Lucy, a woman in her mid-twenties who owns a homestead in the eastern Cape. This is several removes from the rural idyll of the Romantic poets, a dusty, incomplete Eden hobbled by 'poor soil, poor land... good only for goats'. But it is a sanctuary of sorts, a place where David might come to terms with his new situation, soothed by unhurried routines and his daughter's calm engag ement with existence.

But in a society as ravaged and scarred as contemporary South Africa, sanctuary can only be fragile and temporary. The homestead becomes the target of a vicious assault in which Lucy is raped and David is bludgeoned, locked in a lavatory and set alight in a manner designed to taunt rather than kill or maim. His impotence as a father and protective male is underlined by this humiliation; the womaniser with the rarefied poetic interests must now confront his daughter's incomprehensible reaction to events : Lucy will not press charges of rape, will not even give voice to the fact of her violation.

Initially the reader shares the father's incredulity. But as the dialogue between father and daughter unfolds between confrontations and silences, Lucy's perspective reveals its inner logic. As a young white liberal who has made a conscious choice to sta y on in South Africa, abjuring the easier option of moving to Europe to live with her Dutch mother, Lucy knows that there are implications, costs, sacrifices. Were she to pursue her rapists, who are black, she would set in motion all the old mechanisms o f the past, unleash ancient prejudices, reopen wounds in the early, tentative stages of healing, set back the whole attempt of a society to knit itself together. Her contribution now, 'in this place, at this time', lies in stretching herself across the p ast like a protective wall or dam. The rape she will diminish in her mind to 'debt collection', a 'purely private matter' between herself and her attackers. And she will stay on in her farm, not in a spirit of bravado or confrontation but as an expressio n of something more elemental: that, somehow, this is what is needed, this might possibly endure.

Such a course does not easily commend itself to David, for whom the whole notion of sacrifice is suspect. But the rape, and his daughter's reaction to it, prove unstoppably destabilising, forcing him to re-examine his life, his priorities, his sense of h imself, his view of what the future holds. The results fall far short of a tidy resolution. Indeed, if Coetzee has a message to convey, it is about the incompleteness of life, its inherent messiness, the necessity of making do. At the end of the novel Da vid has achieved at least this understanding.

This is a big novel, presented tautly and with understatement in a little over 200 pages. It is not without unevenness: like his protagonist, Coetzee is more at ease in the world of libraries and lecture theatres than in the rural Cape, and the opening s ection of the novel charting David's fall from grace is particularly persuasive. Not every strand introduced into the story works, however. A recurring motif is the unrealised music in David's head, and his attempt, through an episode in Byron's life, to give voice to it. There are interesting possibilities in the clash between inner music and external mundanity, between past poetic yearnings and the challenge of the present, but Coetzee perhaps leaves himself too little space in which to explore them c onvincingly. But such caveats in no way detract from Coetzee's achievement. Disgrace is an outstanding work of fiction, opening windows not only on a distant land but on painful, problematic areas of human experience that all of us find easy to pass by.