Disgrace
(JM Coetzee)
One of John Coetzee?s great strengths as a writer is that he does not spare either his audience nor himself. His work is austere and incisive. There is no waste here, no superfluity of words. His prose is elegant and dry. His pen cuts to the heart.
Disgrace is a book about a place at a particular time. It is, in other words, like so many of Coetzee?s books, an allegory about a society in change.
Professor David Lurie is a self-centred and largely complacent white South African academic. We learn that he seduces his students. So far, so typical. And once upon a time, so what? But Lurie has not noticed that the world he used to inhabit is disappearing fast. And he does so in a series of shocks that finally force him to reassess himself and his place in society.
The young woman student (whom we later learn is of mixed blood) reports him to the university and he loses his job and his friends. Her parents, from whom he seems to expect easy forgiveness when he goes in search of her, are unwelcoming.
Lurie takes refuge with his daughter on a smallholding she works with her African neighbour. One apocalyptic day, he and she are attacked. As he stands on the seat of the lavatory and peers out of the window, he realises he has no language with which to speak to their attackers. Literally, in the sense that he has no African languages. Metaphorically because they occupy a world he does not have the keys to enter.
Thus Lurie?s old world is pushed away as South Africa prepares to give way for the birth of the new ? represented in the baby his raped daughter carries in her womb. She will not speak to him, but gravitates towards her attackers and the new society they must construct.
And so Lurie finds his place at last, helping a woman of his own age look after dogs, many of whom must be put to sleep. This Lurie does tenderly, as befits the burial of the his now powerless world.
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