The tyranny of goodwill, logic

Surrealism has never quite been J M Coetzee's forte. So, despite all the craftsmanship, his latest offering is not quite what is expected from this vastly gifted writer

Spotting the Christ-figure is a great fixation of the modern literary criticism of fiction, especially the American variety. The 2006 Nobel Literature laureate J M Coetzee makes this task a child’s play (the pun is irresistible) for his new novel whose title and the central character directly refer to the Christ-child. Bread loaves, fish, blood, consubstantiation (the doctrine that the body and blood of Christ coexist in and with the elements of the Eucharist) all make frequent appearances in this tale of a child, a woman and a man setting out on a quest to start their lives anew in an alien land.

Yet treating it as a fresh reworking of the Christ theme will need considerable leaps of faith and imagination. The seemingly simple story concerns a man, apparently middle-aged and a young child of about five starting their new lives in the chief city Novilla (which is also a port) in an unnamed country. Everyone in the country, whose geography or history we never know, is apparently an immigrant who has landed washed up clean of their past in this haven. The land is a virtual Utopia, with an all-knowing and providing administration, much like a Scandinavian country. There is a major difference though. This country allows no deviation from its set template. Everyone must speak only Spanish, go by the name given at the registration centre on arrival, live in the quarters provided and so on. The state is benevolent. It appears to subsidise everything, if not offer the service free. But everyone must obey the rules.

The man Simón has one mission: to find the mother of the boy David. He is utterly convinced that she is in the place and he and the boy will know her as soon as they set eyes on her. He becomes a stevedore, unloading grain at the docks under the benign supervision of Alvaro the foreman and in the company of amiable mates. He gets an allotted flat and settles to a routine, the better to continue his search. He finds the mother in Ines, a virginal tennis-playing young woman who appears to be a member of the idle rich of the country. She tamely accepts the motherhood and the child thrust upon her, along with Simón’s flat. The latter moves out to lead a vagabond existence, but is a constant and loving visitor and the chief architect of David’s upbringing.

Despite the enormous goodwill of his fellow workers and the all-providing state, Simón finds life in Novilla oddly disquieting. He finds the recourse to manual unloading not merely fatigue-intensive, but not in keeping with the times as well. The food, mostly bread and beanpaste, is bland and unsatisfying. The quest for higher concerns in the institute that most of his colleagues frequent is characterised by philosophy of being tables and chairs. The all-seeing administration, manifested only in the likes of the rather lowly teachers, tribunal judges, and clerks at state-run brothels, is benign but utterly bereft of any feeling or consideration for the exceptional.

His biggest grouse is that he does not find “goodwill as a universal balm for all our ills,” as he tells Elena, mother of David’s playmate Fidel, the only woman friend he has made. Even as she engages in purely utilitarian sex with him, she tries to pinpoint his problems: “In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing. The name that you choose to give this something-more that is missing is passion. Yet I am willing to bet that if tomorrow you were offered all the passion you wanted – passion by the bucketful – you would promptly find something new to miss, to lack. This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of, in my opinion. Nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.”

We have been here before. This is familiar Coetzee territory. David Lurie in Disgrace (Coetzee’s most significant novel in this reviewer’s opinion) and the fictionalised Fyodor Dostoevsky of The Master of Petersburg have been eloquent proponents of the melancholy Simón appears to share with them. Simón’s questioning of his colleagues is also of a piece with the struggles of his literary predecessors with their kindly peers nursing very different sensibilities.

After Ines appears on the scene about a third of the way into the novel, the travails of the child, his self-appointed godfather and the virgin bestowed with motherhood take centre stage. David becomes ever more opinionated and quarrelsome, even as we are told that he is exceptional and lovable. Ines is besotted with her new-found motherly feelings (much later in the book, she confesses to Simón, “Do you really think that I had not longed for a child?”) and spoils David rotten. Simón tries to teach David the three R’s but the child engages in his own fantasies fuelled by his love of Don Quixote (his prized possession is an illustrated children’s book of the man from La Mancha). David wants to be a magician, a healer and claims he could bring the dead to life.

The state decides that David must attend school when he turns six. Of course, that turns out to be a fiasco. He is seen not be able to read and write except in his fantasy way, nor count normally, with no sense of numbers. His teacher and the school psychologist decide that David is a bad influence on the other children and must be sent to a special school (read reformatory), a decision upheld by a tribunal. That is accomplished even as Simón undergoes a near-death experience.

David escapes and the convalescent Simón becomes an accomplice of Ines’ in a cross-country escapade. He is initially reluctant, but soon realises that there is no turning back. Along the way they pick up a hitch-hiker, Juan. Together they head for a new town, Estrellita, “Looking for somewhere to stay, to start our new life,” as the novel ends.

Coetzee titillates us with a possible divine status of the child: when the teacher asks him to write, “I must tell the truth,” David writes “Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth.” When discussing the expression God knows, David asks Simón, “Who is God?” “God knows is an expression. It’s a way of saying no one knows…” “Is God no one?” “Don’t change the subject. God is not no one, but he lives too far away for us to converse with him.”

Coetzee writes in his customary present tense, with extremely enjoyable fluidity. The wizardry of his writing is such that even as all these strange goings-on occur in a land of no name or whereabouts, we are not bothered by the absence of any antecedents. It is as if the reader, too, is washed clean as he enters Novilla. The events and the landscape unfold before us with a magical serendipity, as if we were watching in our minds a phantasmagorical film.

The choice of names is also interesting, with characters embodying the spirit of their names: Simón, the pure and honest; David, the most lovable; Fidel, the loyal playmate; Álvaro, the friend; Elena, the beautiful. David’s true guards are Simón and Bolivar, the Alsatian. The final companion to David is a somewhat older mate, Juan (the Baptist?) Only Ines has no significance. No wonder hers is the least satisfying character in the book!

Yet for all the craftsmanship, I found this new offering by this great modern novelist not quite what I expected from him. Because of the title and the exceedingly strenuous efforts all the way through the book, we must accept this as a Christ parable. But what tyranny is this Christ (who is always a rebel) militating against?

There are two systems that appear oppressive: the benevolent yet dehumanising welfare state, and the conventional logic. Simón himself is agitated by the former. That part of the struggle is very vivid and compelling. But David’s retreat from logic, including his total immersion in the Don Quixote legend (is that why Coetzee has imposed Spanish on the inhabitants of this land?) is far less explicable and convincing, except as a normal childhood recourse to fantasy. Simón and David engage in some dialogues about numbers and logic, but these extremely elementary discourses in set theory would appeal only to those with not even rudimentary acquaintance with any epistemology.

All fiction needs imagination. But I have often wondered why some successful writers engage in surrealism which has never been their forte. Coetzee’s great strength has always been his incisive ability to delve into the innermost recesses of characters oppressed by reality. He does that brilliantly with David Lurie (Disgrace), Paul Rayment (Slow Man) and even the inchoate Michael K. But this attempt is comparable to The Life of Pi. Unfortunately, what works for Yann Martel does not quite work for a vastly more gifted Coetzee.
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS
Author: J M Coetzee
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Pages: 277
Price: Indian price not given