Living on Next to Nothing

As usual Coetzee in Slow Man is concerned with the moral life—or the struggle to maintain or earn it. But this novel is a return to his earlier realism—none of the high jinks of Coetzee's Costello novel. How does one reconstruct one's life after a shattering experience?

When Paul Rayment is knocked off his bicycle by an oncoming car and finds himself in the hospital, where he is told he must lose a leg, he is helpless to resist the tides of fate. But he fights back as soon as he can and refuses to accept a prosthesis. He has no kin to lean on, and he cannot abide the first few nurses sent to care for him when he leaves the hospital. Finally he gets a nurse who is all too satisfactory and grows to depend on her not only for his physical needs but for his spiritual comfort as well—he falls in love. And indeed Marijana sounds both practical and attractive.

Originally from Bosnia, Marijana is now in Australia with a son and a daughter, plus a husband. For a while Paul refuses to admit his feelings for her. He wants to help the family, particularly the son, Drago, who is also very attractive in appearance and behavior. He offers to pay the expenses to send the boy to a good school. Paul insists that he is entirely altruistic, that he wants nothing in return. But his good deed causes chaos in the family, setting husband against wife and causing the son to take off on his own.

Paul has developed feelings for Marijana and becomes fully alive in a new way. A former lover comes to see him and would gladly resume their old affair, but Paul shies away. Yet, in an episode daringly original and strangely moving, Paul makes love to a blind woman. It is part of his education in love and is purely physical—an education in touch. During the act he too is sightless. Touch becomes all-important, and Coetzee's skill in imagining the couple's feelings is memorable.

Apparently Paul needs further guidance out of his moral quandary, and, behold, Elizabeth Costello appears like a ministering angel, though to Paul she seems more like a gadfly who refuses to have the tact to disappear. We know Elizabeth from her previous appearances in Coetzee's work. She is a woman of strong opinions and an adventurous spirit in an increasingly frail body. What she is doing here only Coetzee knows; it is her mystery more than her familiarity that counts. Actually she carries little of her former baggage with her. She has been promoted to the rank of sybil.

Elizabeth's role as guru to an unwilling apprentice affords opportunities for wry humor tinged with pathos. Elizabeth is not really all-wise; in fact she seems as doubtful about her destiny as Paul is about his. Why she should have chosen Paul to stick to like a burr is incomprehensible to her as well as to him. And yet they were "made for each other." Both are dragged into the real world with reluctance we can only partly share, and the tension is compelling. Paul is never allowed to rest.

The difficulties of love! On the one hand he is scolded by Elizabeth Costello for his inadequacies; on the other Marijana makes his love seem hopeless. When she comes to carry out her nursely duties and massage his stump, he feels "how near and yet how far! Breast to breast they might as well be, pushing their fallen selves into each other. What happiness!" Then, while Marijana straddles him, caressing a sore spot on his buttock, he looks up to see her little daughter staring at him with a derisive expression. What must the little girl think as she stares at this old, ugly, hairy, and probably smelly creature! He brings the episode to a swift conclusion. Thus are the sublime and the ridiculous joined together.

As Elizabeth tells him, men, old...