Foes (Page 3)

Many years later, in Elizabeth Costello and now in Diary of a Bad Year, he has begun to try. The monologue has become a dialogue. Elizabeth Costello engages a variety of interlocutors in her travels as a public speaker. JC engages Anya, and not just in the sense that she corrects a phrase or two. Their falling-out leads him to re-evaluate "not my opinions themselves so much as my opinion of my opinions." He learns to see them through her eyes, comes to regret their strongness, their hardness. In a postscript to his letter, he promises "a second, gentler set of opinions," more personal, some of which will take up suggestions she has let drop. And that is what we get in the novel's last third, or at least the top third of its last third, essays on aging and boredom and the writer's own father, more narrative in style and generous in spirit. "Soft Opinions," she calls them.

The adjective could apply to the novel as a whole, its ominous title notwithstanding. Diary of a Bad Year sets up the typical Coetzeean situation: a white person, privileged but vulnerable (through age or disability or isolation), comes to rely on a person of color, a dependent or inferior of some kind, for sustenance and safety. The scenario, like the prose, is mercilessly spare: two wills face to face, scraping together like metal against metal. In the normal course of things, the white protagonist is inexorably stripped of every comfort and dignity, the bare bones of the human situation exposed with an allegorical directness reminiscent of Beckett.

But here, Coetzee gives us a soft landing. Instead of humiliation and suffering, compassion and communion. He seems to be mellowing with age. His last novel, Slow Man, ended in a similarly gentle fashion. It must also be said that after an unbroken string of triumphs that began with his first work of fiction, including a half-dozen masterpieces that establish him, in my view, as the supreme English novelist of the last thirty years and the greatest living writer in the language, these last two works fall short of the spiritual and imaginative intensity--the Dostoyevskian sense of prophecy, to use E.M. Forster's term--that distinguish their predecessors. Like Exit Ghost, the new novel might both enact and announce its author's withdrawal from the seas of fiction-making, or at least from its tempests. When Anya asks JC why he doesn't just write a novel, he tells her that he no longer has the endurance. "To write a novel you have to be like Atlas," he says, holding up a world on your shoulders. The new novel is fragmented in form, and its narrative portions amount to the length of a novella. As Roth does in Exit Ghost, Coetzee introduces the process of aging not merely into the subject of his fiction but into its very form.

Even if the temperature of the new novel is lower than that of its predecessors, its commitments are the same. Coetzee is and always has been, in the deepest sense, a Christian writer. He has written scorchingly of the Calvinism of his Afrikaner upbringing, but what he has called, in another context, the "Calvinist categorical imperative of absolute urgency and absolute stringency" precisely describes his work. "I am not a Christian," he said in Doubling the Point, "or not yet." But what he means by the word is clearly something very different from what passes in the marketplace. The initials "JC" are not deployed casually in Diary of a Bad Year; they signify not Coetzee's belief in his own mission or election but his acceptance of the principle of imitatio Christi--the obligation to receive Christ as one's ethical norm. When Coetzee says he's not a Christian yet, he means he still falls short of that unappeasable ideal.

Nothing shows up the blather of the "God wars," on both sides, like this kind of moral seriousness. In the philosophical realm, if not, alas, in the political one, the question of the literal truth of religious ideas is utterly beside the point. For what it's worth (precisely nothing), Coetzee gives no evidence of possessing that kind of belief. What matters is that he regards Christian ideas as spiritual realities, moral realities: heaven, hell, sin, the soul, suffering, grace, redemption, love; Christ and Judas, angels and demons, the thief in the night and the least among us.

Matters are no different in Diary of a Bad Year, even if the ratio of salvation to suffering is radically improved. JC and Anya help each other toward a modicum of redemption. She learns to think of herself as something more than an ass with a brain attached, and so does he. Eros gives way to agape, spiritual love, and if the path is smoothed with a little sentimentality, Coetzee allows his characters their small self-deceptions. As in so much of his work, the ethical crux is duty of care--in particular, care for the dead, the one form of kindness that we can never repay, and that saves our bodies when they are all we have left. JC has a dream that comes to haunt him, "about dying and being guided to the gateway to oblivion by a young woman." For the greatest of these is love.

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