J.M. Coetzee: Youth

By PAT BASKETT

Sometimes one has to steel oneself for Coetzee. He scrapes the very bottom of the barrel, exposes the little lies we comfort ourselves with. Pretence is no use. Worse, self-deception, disappointment, compromise and complicity in the world's evils are our fate.

That's a hard message and this is a tough little book. Remember the atmosphere of gloom and moral ambiguity that pervaded The Master of Petersburg?

This time, Coetzee has laid it all out. In 169 pages he describes the death of hope, innocence and the other aspirations and emotions that filled one between the ages of 19 and 24.

John is studying mathematics in South Africa. He is dissatisfied with everything except his ambition to become a poet. When the time is right two things will happen: he will be filled with passionate love for a beautiful woman and he will write great poetry. Meanwhile, he consoles himself with the belief that happy people aren't interesting.

South Africa is not the place for him to realise his ambitions and the Sharpeville massacre convinces him to leave. It is 1962 and he catches a boat to London, where he takes a job as a computer programmer and continues his wait.

The city provides no redemption and his unhappiness deepens. Misery, he rationalises, is a school for the soul. Yet misery does not feel like a purifying bath. It feels like a pool of dirty water.

He quits his job and on receiving a scholarship from his university, decides to write a dissertation on Ford Maddox Ford. Here, too, disappointment lurks when he discovers the mediocrity of Ford's lesser-known novels.

So it's back to computer programming and the abandonment of ambition. At the end of the book he is generating poems by computer in the style of Pablo Neruda and has one published.

He has achieved a perverse kind of happiness even if the moral basis of his life is crap. But: "The right thing is boring ... he would rather be bad than boring ... " On the way to this tenuous equilibrium John has passionless sex with a string of unbelievably compliant young women.

Political events - the Aldermaston marches, the Cold War, the pass laws in South Africa - slide by, with our anti-hero failing to engage, and we are taken on a guided tour of late-50s art, literature and music.

Coetzee has never been a stylist. Here, the present tense has a relentlessness about it, as do the short, staccato sentences and the questions by means of which he takes us into John's mind. Occasionally, the prose transcends the drabness of its subject matter and we find a beautiful passage where despair has a cadenced elegance.

There's nothing uplifting but still Coetzee - whose novel Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999 - remains a master.

Secker & Warburg

$49.95

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.