Bad Year, Good Year

The form of J. M. Coetzee’s latest fiction raises interesting questions. He has chosen a three-tiered progression going on simultaneously. The top tier is called Strong Opinions (mostly political and historical ideas); in the middle there is a narrative about the speaker and his secretary; on the bottom runs a connected narrative about the secretary and her erstwhile boyfriend. All three strands (usually) appear on the same page.

It was a bad year, the strong opinions say, for civil rights, democracy, justice for the oppressed, and peace in the world. We presume a German publisher has asked the speaker for a book of his opinions, and he has agreed to supply them. The relationship between him and his secretary keeps growing into greater intimacy (the second tier). Last and perhaps least is the relationship between the secretary, Anya, and the erstwhile boyfriend, Alan, which gradually deteriorates.

The strong opinions could stand by themselves (as they advance they grow more personal), but even from an eminent author that could be a commercial disaster. Add an intriguing story—or two—and the whole perspective changes. Are you getting more for your money or less?

Many novels have what amounts to interspersed essays—consider Moby-Dick or War and Peace—and we would not do without them. No such close connection exists between the strong opinions and the other two stories, except for the fact that the speaker and his secretary are recording the very opinions we are reading above. All three parts of the layer cake are racing for a climax at once! (Try baking that metaphor!) For me this format works. But don’t try it again. And he won’t. Coetzee tries something new in every novel.

Let us sample those opinions. As he tells his secretary, the plan is to have six contributors present their opinions on what is wrong with the world today—the more contentious the better. (Too bad we don’t get the five other eminent authors. Maybe they are waiting in the wings.) At any rate Coetzee has certainly done his part.

The speaker listens to the fifth symphony by Sibelius and thinks how proud a Fin must have felt at the first performance, “proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff.” On the other hand what shame that “we, our people, have made Guantanamo.” Human beings are at their best and worst. Though Coetzee is concerned to show the dark side of humanity, he never forgets the greatness we are capable of. And how about the “second diary”? It is full of opinions too. Each of the three main characters is constantly reflecting on the other two. Alan is an investment consultant. Money and a good time are his main interests. But he did give up his wife in order to be with his sweetheart. The writer is unafraid to live among cockroaches and to wear smelly clothes—an old man (at least in her eyes) she would rather not be too close to.

What happens? Alan, who seemed sensible, clever, and realistic turns out to be an unprincipled pig; whereas the dirty old man has won Anya over—as a friend—but also as a writer. (She prefers his “soft opinions” to his political writings.) She has left him as his typist, but she promises when he is dying to “hold his hand tight and give him a kiss on the brow just to remind him of what he is leaving behind . . . and I will whisper in his ear, sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest.” What a sweet victory!

And perhaps we, too, prefer the soft opinions. Certainly they are closer to the writer’s heart. Of J. S. Bach he says that the fact we come into this world to find, absolutely free, the music of this man is enough to make us believe “there may perhaps be a God after all.” On another occasion he takes down The Brothers Karamozov and reads...