Hi, everyone, welcome back to Susurrus, the books podcast on Fountain Ink.

This time, I wanted to speak about one of my favourite writers, the Nobel Prize winner and the first writer to be awarded the Booker Prize twice … J M Coetzee. Over the quarter century since he last won the prize, several of his novels have been on the longlist and shortlist for the Booker, but he has not won an unprecedented third time … dare we say, yet?

He is the author of fifteen novels so far, the latest being the 2022 book, The Pole.

This was preceded by The Jesus Trilogy, or the “Hesoos” Trilogy, if you’re going to go with the Spanish pronunciation.

And I think with The Pole, Coetzee comes back to some of the aspects that have made him such a unique writer … the fact that he has strong opinions on politics, but is so revulsed and revolted by the language and judgments of both the Right and the Left that he has rarely been able to align himself with a political stance in its entirety–except, and we will eventually come to that–in the case of animals and the fight for their rights. To the extent that he wanted to be a candidate in the 2014 European Parliament election for the Dutch Party for the Animals. That went nowhere, because he was not resident in the European Union, a prerequisite for the post.

There are three specific aspects of Coetzee’s writing that I’d like to discuss in this episode.

I think the first, perhaps most evident in Disgrace, his 1999 Booker Prize winner and arguably his most popular book, is the conflict that his main characters face between what they really want to do and what they think they should want to do … this sense of obligation, that goes against everything they truly feel, that fills them eventually with self-revulsion, to the extent they forgive—or at least, don’t condemn or blame—the people whose actions triggered the act or the emotions. Take Disgrace for instance, where a woman goes against every grain of her being, every warning she has heard, to put herself in an extremely dangerous situation and then is not able to bring herself to take action, to even punish, the man responsible for a horrific crime. This happens in The Pole as well, and again, this is a woman, the main character is a woman, and she must deal with attention from a man who is persistent and perverse in equal measure. And, as always, there is the quashing of all hope in an act which is emotionally as violent as the crime in Disgrace was physically violent.

I don’t like giving away much of the plot of any book, but I think I should tell you about this emotionally violent act in The Pole. It has to do with a series of poems dedicated to this woman by a man who claimed to be in love with her … poems written in a language she does not understand, poems that she must decide whether or not to have translated. And that, too, has to do with whether or not she is willing to be judged by the translator, in addition to the neighbour and daughter of the man who has written those poems. The neighbour and daughter, we are led to believe, have already read the poems in the original and perhaps know more about—or at least, think they know more about–the subject of those poems, and the feelings for her that the poet had, than she herself knows.

The second aspect I want to look at, and this is perhaps the most enduring strand of his work, to the extent it appeared in his Nobel lecture—is the characters’ craving for solitude, even in the face of a terrible fear of loneliness. To me, this comes through most evidently in his fictionalised memoirs, another trilogy—Boyhood, Youth and Summertime. In his Nobel lecture, "He and His Man", he takes off on Robinson Crusoe and his return from the island, and his tenuous relationship with the person referred to as “His Man”. And to me, the standout part of the lecture is this chilling paragraph:

“We should make due preparation for death, or else be struck down where we stand. As he, Robinson, was made to see when of a sudden, on his island, he came one day upon the footprint of a man in the sand. It was a print, and therefore a sign: of a foot, of a man. But it was a sign of much else too. You are not alone, said the sign; and also, No matter how far you sail, no matter where you hide, you will be searched out.”

The sign, to most of us at the time we came across the incident in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was a positive one, that one is not alone. That Crusoe has company and is likely the better for it. 

But is one really better for company after years upon years of … what is neither loneliness nor solitude, but alone-ness? And this is also the leading sentiment in Slow Man, the first novel he wrote after delivering that very lecture, after resolving those very thoughts.

And Slow Man features one of my favourite characters, a character with a book to herself, and yet who makes guest appearances in other works. She is perhaps the closest in nature to Coetzee hismelf, although she seems to be the very opposite … a foil, perhaps, and yet the voice of the author. She is Elizabeth Costello, outspoken woman, interfering busybody, and lover of life, animals, and everything in between. She also features in the novel The Lives of Animals, which in fact preceded the eponymous novel dedicated to her life. And she makes another appearance in the 2011 short story, Lies.

It struck me when I read Elizabeth Costello that she is in some ways a bit like Doris Lessing, except she is also J. M. Coetzee. Through the novel, she travels the world giving lectures, and many of these are drawn from Coetzee’s own writing in columns and other forums. 

In the case of Elizabeth Costello, the character and not the novel, the principle which drives much of what she does is kindness to animals … and activism against animal cruelty, which is again the one thing that moves Coetzee to go out and speak to people. Long before actors began to use award ceremonies as platforms to speak about veganism, Elizabeth Costello was doing it. And I think this is where the real Coetzee is … the man who thinks dead dogs should receive a dignified sendoff, the man who writes a strong protest against animal experimentation when he is alerted to it, the man who even in his Nobel Lecture about something entirely different, alludes to the cruelty to animals that is a natural aspect of most human beings.

We’re running out of time, so although I don’t ever want to stop talking about Coetzee, I must now. If you’ve never read him, I think you might either want to start with Disgrace–which is in many ways, his easiest novel in that its conflicts are more explicit than in his other work–or his fictionalised memoirs.

And then, you should go on to his debut, Dusklands, which shows you just what a master of his craft he was, even while writing his first novel. It might also be the most political of his books, at least the most overtly political. And this is where his preoccupation with language, and the ways in which language can be used to push a particular philosophy or a particular prejudice, is most evident.

I’ll say goodbye for now with that. Please do write in to me at f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k@fountainink.in, that’s feedback@fountainink.in. Happy reading and see you in a couple of weeks!