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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/04/the-death-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review The final book of Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is also its darkest, keeping the mystery at the books’ heart intact to the end
Martin Amis once complained that JM Coetzee had “got no talent”, showing perhaps that obsessive ranking of talent (here used in a far more debased sense than TS Eliot’s) is a pastime favoured by those who are not, like Coetzee, writers of genius. Even more improbably, Amis claimed that Coetzee was not funny, which bespeaks a cloth ear for the more sophisticated kind of irony. It would certainly surprise readers of the hilarious Slow Man, or indeed the first two novels in this sequence, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, in which a dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when reminiscent of Kafka (and Coetzee’s own early Waiting for the Barbarians) is illuminated by sparks of sardonic humour or sheer childlike silliness. The final book of the trilogy, however, as one might with trepidation expect from its title, is a far darker affair. The remarkable child, David, whose origin and parents are unknown, is now 10 years old, living with his guardians, Simón – the novel’s third-person observer – and Inès, in a small town called Estrella. Having been judged too obstinate for regular schooling, he takes only dancing and music classes at the local academy. The novel opens with Simón watching David and the other local boys playing kickabout. As often, Coetzee employs cliche (that device against which Amis has long been at exhausting war) for elemental, universalising effect. “It was a crisp autumn afternoon,” reads the deceptively easeful first line of an opening paragraph that is so studied in its normality that the appearance near its end of “a man in a dark suit” is already powerfully ominous. Continue reading...
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