- This novel is the final in Coetzee's magnificent Jesus trilogy - The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus. In my opinion it's the best of the three.
- It shares the formal prose style of the previous two, reading like an Elizabethan drama, and investing the story with a level of fabulism akin to the gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth. The boy David is an otherworldly creature and his story full of parables.
- In this final novel David is only ten years old but he 'cannot or will not do sums. More worryingly, he will not read’. He only reads Cervante's classic novel Don Quixote, and is obsessed with the comic idealist's opposition to anything real. The central theme is idealism versus reality. Quixote’s idealism promises liberation. As his followers cry ‘liberate us from our wretched fate...make our chains fall away’.
- Likewise, David has a mind of his own, undeveloped as it is. He's over-confident, even arrogant. He’s an ‘extravagante’ according to his teacher, and a gifted dancer.
- Simon and Ines are his foster parents who took him in five years previously and love him deeply. However a local orphanage and its soccer team holds an attraction for David that he can't resist. He wants to live there. So he makes an accusation against Simon, who's been ‘...doing bad things to me’.
- The relationship between Simon and Ines is a more central focus of this book than David, and is very well presented. They are caring, loving people, flummoxed by David’s new sense of independence. They argue, of course, but in the end their frustrations with David's eccentricities invest this novel with real power. When he suddenly becomes quite ill and is confined to hospital, the leaden, bureaucratic protocols of the hospital put enormous strain on them. In the end David dies of the mysterious, undiagnosed illness, and Simon and Ines continue to be treated disrespectfully by the hospital staff because 'there are rules we have to follow'.
- In all three books in the series Coetzee makes no specific Christian references. Apart from the titles there is no Jesus, heaven, hell, miracles, or even Mary and Joseph. It’s a secular world. However Ines and Simon are clearly Mary and Joseph, ‘companeros’, not husband and wife or in any sexual union. The novel explores their relationship. They are just human beings. The Christian gospels, on the other hand, never present them as such. And Jesus was fully human too, no doubt as annoying as David. So Coetzee is essentially demystifying the biblical story, removing its supernatural embellishments. After David's death was there a resurrection of sorts? No, just memories.
- But Simon does say at one point: ‘The world may be as it was before, but it is also different’. And his former dance teacher says: ‘You could learn only by following. When David danced he was somewhere else, and if you were able to follow him you would be transported to that place too’.
- The peculiar Dimitri character, so central to the second book, is a key player in this one too. He's a passionate 'follower' of David. After David's death he writes long letters to Simon, who he considers 'ordinary'. What are we to make of these letters? They smack of devotion but also of madness. While Simon and Ines go their separate ways, into normal lives, is Dimitri, an unabashed enthusiast, soon to become a gospel writer?
No comments:
Post a Comment