His help must be asked for and his protection sought, particularly by a woman living alone, and it may be that his ambition is to take over the land rather than share it. In the new South Africa, the man who was once the kaffir calls the shots. In this narrative, country life is not therapy but ordeal, not a pastoral but a war of attrition.

He helps at a clinic of the Animal Welfare League and supervises the disposal of dogs which have been put down, briefly taking charge of a hospital incinerator each week … But there is also an opposite story, not running parallel to the other but built from the same set of materials. “Those who require narratives of healing will find plenty of material from which to construct one: Lurie does some physical work for a change and comes to feel a connection with animals. The reading mind responds to the possibilities in disconcerting alternation. What follows is somehow simultaneously a story of redemption and of collapse, just as a famous optical illusion is simultaneously a duck and a rabbit, but can only be seen at any one moment as one or the other. JM Coetzee’s quietly deceptive new novel exploits this reflex, with a narrative that belongs to two opposite types simultaneously, revealing its true allegiance only on the last page-in fact the last sentence.ĭavid Lurie, a divorced university professor in his fifties, leaves Cape Town in disgrace to stay with his daughter Lucy on her smallholding in the Eastern Cape.

“The novel may not inherently be a dialectical form, but readers are so used to a synthesising process that they may detect one without help from the author.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee