J.M. Coetzee: Slow Man

Anyone who has read a J.M. Coetzee novel knows they are in for an intellectual buffeting — a story that will — in sparing, erudite prose — push, pull, twist, and generally leave the reader wrung out. At first Slow Man doesn't disappoint.

Sixty-something Paul Rayment is knocked off his bicycle and has to have a leg amputated. He doesn't lose it well. "Not in all his days has he seen a naked prosthesis. The picture that comes to mind is of a wooden shaft with a barb at its head like a harpoon and rubber suckers on its three little feet. It is out of surrealism. It is out of Dali."

Coetzee is relentless in his examination of Paul's predicament. His despair: "If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again."

His rejection of a prosthesis: "Crutches are at least honest." His puzzling over what amputation means: "Despite having no arms the Venus of Milo is held up as an ideal of feminine beauty."

The rehabilitation doesn't go that well either. Humiliated by "the thing, the stump", Paul withdraws from his friends and reflects on his wasted life. "Childlessness looks to him like madness, a herd madness, even a sin." His only solace is his nurse, the matronly Croatian Marijana Jokic, with whom he develops an "inchoate attachment."

It's at this point that Coetzee introduces an unsettling device. Enter "celebrated Australian novelist" Elizabeth Costello, who Coetzee fans will know is the subject (and title) of a previous book. "You came to me," she tells Paul. "I came to you? You came to me!" Paul shouts. Against this testy relationship with the ageing Elizabeth Slow Man's plot — an ageing amputee's unfulfilled longing for his care-giver and his clumsy attempts to appropriate her children — plays out.

Elizabeth prods Paul to think, to be something more than he is, to act, to take control of his own narrative. She also orchestrates alternative futures. Paul stubbornly resists. He will not be her puppet. "What I don't understand is, seeing that I am so dull, so unresponsive to your schemes, why you persist with me. Drop me I beseech you, let me get on with my life."

What follows is a battle of wills — author versus character — and constant bickering. "Now let me ask you straight out. Mrs Costello: Are you real?" To which Elizabeth replies. "Of course I am real. As real as you."

The result is a collision of discordant themes. Ideas of care and love rub up against the nature of literary creativity. Not to mention the relation of fact to imagination, and questions about identity and existence. It's a challenging whirlwind. Watching authorial schemes thwarted by a sad, slowing, intractable character does, at times, have an irritating, disengaging effect. It's as though Coetzee became bored with his storyline and decided to throw a spanner in the works just for the hell of it. But Paul's dithering and Elizabeth's frustrated machinations also provide an insight into suffering and loneliness in twilight years.

* Chris Barton is a Herald features writer.