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Anything J.M. Coetzee writes deserves our full attention. He has won the Nobel, and the Booker twice. He is surely the most distinguished novelist now writing in the English language. For the last seven years he has been publishing a trilogy (his second, in succession to his three marvellous autobiographical books, Youth, Boyhood and Summertime, gathered in one volume as Scenes from Provincial Life).
It began, quite bafflingly, with The Childhood of Jesus in 2013. Narrated in the present tense, set in no identifiable time or place, the novel described the arrival in a city called Novilla, in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country, of a refugee in his forties called Simón, a man without any memory of his past, accompanied by a strange five-year-old boy called David, whom he met on the boat and to whom he is not related. Simón takes it upon himself to look after David and to search for his mother, mysteriously identifying her as a woman he spots playing tennis, Inés, although she is not actually related. Together with her imposing Alsatian dog Bolívar, they form a peculiar family.
David is an inspired, mystical boy, oddly authoritative, disruptive at school. Told to write “I must tell the truth” on the blackboard, he writes instead “Yo soy la verdad. I am the truth” (John 14.6). Everything he says and does is similarly intransitive (not passing over to another person or object). Throughout there are Biblical echoes, although he is only named as Jesus in the book’s title (Jesus was of the House of David, of course). Reviewing the book, frankly puzzled, I hoped Coetzee might explain this peculiar fable a little, famously unforthcoming though he is. Instead, at a reading in Cape Town, he said: “I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus. But in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed.” Hah!
The Schooldays of Jesus followed in 2016, picking up the story exactly where it had been left off. Having fled a reform school, David and his odd guardians have moved to a provincial town, Estrella. There, David attends a private academy of dance. His dancing expresses nothing less than the stars above, prime numbers, the universe itself. But the academy is disrupted by the presence of a Dostoevskyian figure called Dmitri. After strangling the academy’s director, the woman he loves, Dmitri accepts his guilt. David, however, now aged just seven or so, embraces him.
Now The Death of Jesus moves the story on about three years. David is still living in Estrella with Simón, Inés and Bolívar, being home schooled, although he still attends the dance academy. Although gifted, “David cannot or will not do sums. More worryingly, he will not read” — save for one book, Don Quixote. He remains completely intransigent in his attitude to the ever-loyal Simón, telling him: “You don’t listen so you don’t understand. There is no why.” Playing football one day, his talents are spotted by the manipulative director of a local orphanage with the ominous name of Dr Fabricante — and David decides that, since Simón and Inés are not his real parents, it is to the orphanage that he belongs. “For whatever reason, perhaps no reason at all, he feels a certain duty toward Fabricante’s orphans, toward orphans in general, the world’s orphans.”
When Simón comes to see him playing football there, David tells him: “You must not come again. You must leave me to do what I have to do.” But he soon falls ill with a mysterious form of “neuropathy” and seizures. Moved to the local hospital, he becomes steadily worse. “Why am I here?” he asks repeatedly. “Why does it have to be me?” He is convinced he is dying and talks about the life to come.
The supposedly reformed murderer Dmitri, now an orderly in the hospital, seems almost to worship him as his master. Meanwhile, David continues to tell stories of great deeds from Don Quixote. And he talks at length with Simón about what will happen to him after death. He says: “I am going to be a teacher and I am going to have a beard.” Simón assures him that Don Quixote will be waiting for him in the next life and will greet him as “David el famoso, the famous David, in whom I am well pleased.” He will lift him up onto Rocinante and “the pair of you will ride off to do your good deeds”. And then David dies. But the book continues, describing the aftermath of his death: the separation of Simón and Inés, the loss of Bolívar, contention over David’s remains and legacy — and a performance in his memory by the children of the Academy of “The Acts and Sayings of David”. It is reported that, acting in his name, local children have begun “overturning displays, haranguing shopkeepers for charging too much” and setting caged animals loose. There is almost nothing in the Bible about the childhood of Jesus. Luke alone describes him at the age of 12 debating with the doctors in the temple at Jerusalem. In part Coetzee’s trilogy can be understood as a genuine attempt to imagine what it might be like to care for such a child, possessed of the uncompromised truth. But then it is also about the life we all know. Coetzee believes that nearly all relationships in adult life are an exchange of fictions and children alone are free from this falsity. In an odd address to the University of Witwatersrand in 2012, urging young men to become primary school teachers, he told them that “most of the people you deal with in your work are not real human beings but shadowy figures playing roles and wearing masks”, whereas children are “never anything but their full human selves”.
Or, as Jesus said: “Truly, I tell you, unless you become like little children, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.” These are strange novels, easily guyed as clumsy allegories, full of sententious philosophizing, deliberately flatly written, too easily claiming significance through their allusion to the Biblical story. I can only report that I have found them, despite the bafflement, full of truth, irreducible, tearfully moving to read.
The Death of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee (Harvill Secker, £18.99), buy it here.
