J.M. Coetzee: Elizabeth Costello

Reviewed by PAT BASKETT

In this unusual novel or, according to its subtitle, "eight lessons", Coetzee imparts his thoughts on literature, the role of the writer, the nature of belief, and the existence of evil through the device of the main character, Elizabeth Costello. She is Coetzee's female counterpart, an award-winning Australian writer (Coetzee is at present attached to the University of Adelaide).

Some of the lessons have been published before, two of them as a small book, The Lives of Animals. All provide demanding and provocative reading, which leaves one with more questions than answers, about the writer and his point of view, as much as about the issues.

Is Coetzee using his creation, Costello, as his mouthpiece or as a means of highlighting fallacious arguments?

Does he really believe that the confinement and slaughter of animals can be compared to the Nazi death camps? Or is he playing devil's advocate?

The reason we accept with impunity the killing of animals, he says, is the same as that which enabled those who ran the death camps to do so, and others to watch the cattle trucks rattle by filled with people - a failure of imagination and a lack of sympathy. They are not us, we feel different from them.

The other seminal lesson is called The Problem of Evil. Costello has difficulty believing in God, but has no doubt about the existence of the Devil. Her problem is whether the writer, in expounding evil, is contaminated by it and, by extension, contaminates the reader.

"For if what we write has the power to make us better people, then surely it has the power to make us worse," Coetzee has her say.

Whether the writer's duty is to write what s/he sees or keep silent on certain things is a moot point, addressed in Coetzee's strange Postscript, a rhapsodic and disquieting piece of writing.

We live in "a time of affliction" in which words "give way beneath your feet like rotting boards". What more poignant yet enigmatic final words to any book than these: "Drowning, we write out of our separate fates. Save us."

Coetzee must be saved, perhaps from himself. Lesson 1, Realism, is the acme of writing, exactly what one expects from a twice-Booker and now Nobel Prize-winner - quirky, witty, with comments from the writer's point of view. Coetzee is hardly a funny writer, but here he makes fun of writing and the rules of realism. It's a heartening beginning to a challenging read.

Knopf, $39.95