Man Booker Prize 1983 / Life and Times de Michael K by JM Coetzee

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1983

Booker club: Life and Times of Michael K

Sam Jordison
Tue 16 Jun 2009

JM Coetzee's first Booker winner about passive resistance in South Africa is elegantly crafted, but its protagonist is more clumsy plot device than character – I'm surprised it won

Thanks to the brief interruption of last year's Best of Booker Prize, the chronology of this trawl through past Booker winners has been warped. I reviewed JM Coetzee's second Booker winner, 1999's Disgrace before getting to this, his first, 1983's Life and Times of Michael K.

The reaction to that Disgrace blog made me nervous about this one. Especially since my negative opinions moved Canada's finest blogger, bookninja, to request that his followers kill me by slipping extra-strength ex-lax into my coffee. But even without that, criticising Coetzee is a dangerous game. He is a Nobel-winning sacred cow of contemporary literature, and any attempts to slaughter him must be made in the face of received and popular opinion.

At first, I thought I was going to escape such conflict. Like Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K makes a good first impression. And who wouldn't be intrigued by a novel inspired by the moral rebellion of a giant panda?

JM Coetzee
Photograph: TIZIANA FABI

This animal, according to Coetzee, ate only young bamboo shoots when free and so refused all other food when captured. It died as a result. The titular Michael K, a borderline simpleton, "not right in the head" and burdened with a cleft lip, enacts a similar biological revolt.

Michael's journey to this ultimate form of passive resistance is well told. We first meet him in Cape Town, where things seem relatively normal – until in discomfitingly casual tones, Coetzee describes a jeep knocking a youth off a road, a crowd gathering, curfew sirens ignored, a man firing a revolver from a nearby building and the arrival of the military. Things are very wrong in this alternate South Africa.

Soon, Michael K decides he cannot stay where he is, especially since his sick mother is hankering for her rural birthplace. So he straps her to a makeshift trolley and heads for the hills. She dies on the way, but he continues with her ashes, to an abandoned farm where he begins to cut his remaining ties with the world; hiding himself away, in a self-made dugout, living off little more than water, light, a few gathered bugs and a crop of pumpkins.

Every so often Michael's quiet existence is disrupted by the war he feels he has no part in. He finds himself in and out of prison camps, forced to work, and to answer questions he does not understand. So he defies his captors by rejecting the food they give him.

All of this is told in fewer than 200 pages. But if it's a thin book, that's not because Coetzee doesn't have a lot to say, or doesn't paint a vivid picture. It's just that his prose is as lean and spare as Michael after months of bugs, pumpkins and sunlight. At its best his writing moves like a cracking whip.

But in spite of such pleasures, I have serious doubts. My main concern is Michael K himself. He's more of a plot device than a real man, and we are constantly reminded how simple Michael is, and how little he understands . Yet he is able frequently to outwit those who would capture him, to work irrigation systems and grow crops, build shelters and – most jarringly – speak eloquently and ask endless searching questions.

The way in which this "simple" man so often voices the central concerns of the book soon stops feeling uncanny and starts to feel clumsy. Perhaps it's intentional; perhaps Coetzee is making a point about how society disregards those who don't follow its absurd logic. But it's hard not to be cynical about such an obscure possibility when so much else in the book is so laboriously spelled out. Coetzee's habit of highlighting his didactic points, as if in red ink and underlined three times, aren't as pronounced as they are in Disgrace, but he still does it too often.

Michael K, for instance, is prone to reader-prodding reflections such as: "Is this my education? … Am I at last learning about life here in a camp?" While the doctor even ferments a desire to tell Michael that his stay in the camp was merely an allegory, and then expound several of the themes, ideas and potential meanings in the book, in case the reader missed them. Who needs York Notes?

Coetzee's lack of faith in his reader's ability to trace his meaning without such interjections becomes almost insulting. He also has an irritating fondness for gnomic utterances almost as annoying as the garden decorations themselves:

"Why does it matter where they are taking us?" he says. "There are only two places, up the line and down the line. That is the nature of trains."

Sounds good. Means nothing. Less than nothing if you consider the uses the Nazis had for their trains.

These are serious annoyances. Especially when so much of the book is so elegantly crafted. I was left with the feeling that this was a deeply flawed book. Much better than Disgrace, but not one I would be inclined to give a prize. Especially in a competition against Graham Swift's Waterland.

THE GUARDIAN