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Master of darkness writes back
Youth
JM Coetzee
2003
Vintage, London
Reviewed by Trevor Steele Taylor
A master of darkness, South Africa’s greatest author has produced with Youth his darkest vision yet.
His previous two novels prepared us for this well for this journey down the river of emotional death. In Boyhood he combined reminiscence with a sadness in decided contrast to a novel such as Alain Fournier’s Les Grandes Moulnes. The memories here are not of magical childhood but of loneliness and emotional distance. In Disgrace his late middle-aged persona, a university lecturer who frequents prostitutes and who seduces a young student leading to his fall from the grace of an academic sinecure, is a cry of despair fuelled by disgust at political correctness, emotional blockades and the pain of patriarchal distance.
If the two previous novels unsettled the guts, Youth goes like a weasel for the viscera.
Essentially a chronological link between Boyhood and Disgrace, the protagonist of Youth, a South African émigré in London of the early sixties, escapes the nullity of South African experience for the cultural capital of Europe. All he finds though is boredom and a society of traditional emotional blockage. Unfortunately for him his own emotional state is glacial and he passes the time with an array of vicious and
uninvolved sexual encounters. The viciousness requires no flying fists, only a lack of either spiritual or physical involvement in the girls he fucks and even the organisation of an abortion is beyond his direct participation.
"All he finds is boredom and a society of traditional emotional blockage"
Just as Conrad’s Kurtz went mad as a European in darkest Africa, Coetzee’s character is a European from darkest Africa who carries his emotional vacuum back to the old country. The one person who he vaguely befriends is a brilliant Indian mathematician who works with him in a mindless computer firm. The Indian, brilliant as he is, comes from a privileged background and cooking for himself is beyond him. All he eats are refectory dinners and bananas. In the novel’s conclusion, Coetzee fantasizes him dropping dead from culinary deprivation and being carried out on a stretcher. The coup de grace is that Coetzee then suggests that the natural correlative is that they come and fetch him on a stretcher next.
A bleak vision this worthy of Edgar Allen Poe or H.P.Lovecraft and like those writers a sincere and intelligent attempt to find spiritual grace within the region of darkness and despair.
Trevor Steele Taylor; co-director of the Cape Town International Film Festival and expert on South African cinema.
