MAN BOOKER PRIZE
BOOKER CLUB: Disgrace
Looking back at the Booker: JM Coetzee
People will have you believe it's a masterpiece, but I found Disgrace didactic, thinly characterised and melodramatic
Sam Jordison
Tue 24 Jun 2008
The book that won JM Coetzee his second Booker prize is, according to Time magazine: "A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland...Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form." OK - if you think about it too hard, that last sentence doesn't make all that much sense, but you know what they're getting at. And hell, it's Time magazine! I could list any number of similar eulogies from similarly august publications. There's also the small matter of the Nobel prize for literature Coetzee received in 2003, not to mention the Booker. Disgrace is a book that most cultural arbiters want us to take extremely seriously.
For the first 50 or so pages I thought I was going to be happy to comply. The opening is a fine piece of writing. Coetzee provides a compelling portrait of a man - David Lurie - out of step with the modern South Africa, reduced since "the great rationalisation" at his university to teaching "communications" instead of "modern languages", seeking sexual solace in the arms of a "honey-brown" prostitute, without whom his life is "as featureless as a desert". There then comes the suitably unpleasant seduction of one of his students, Melanie. It's described with cold, clinical precision. Lurie talks rot about an attractive woman's "duty to share" her "beauty" and plies the girl with drink. The girl is too unformed, too "passive" to resist his inappropriate amour. It's pathetic and correspondingly discomfiting.
The trouble really starts when the book moves on to its second stage. Lurie moves in with his lesbian daughter Lucy in the agricultural middle of nowhere and they are subjected to a savage attack: Lurie is covered in meths and set on fire and Lucy is repeatedly raped.
There's an argument for saying that all literature is dependent on coincidence. But it doesn't have to be as clumsily handled as it is here. Once again, reading the book becomes an all too basic exercise in compare and contrast. Look! It almost screams. Lurie is a father too! And look how similar his situation is to Melanie's father, just 20 pages later! But how different too! Meanwhile, there are BIG THEMES of race in the new South Africa, colonial guilt, the fact that the old tyranny of apartheid has been replaced with a new barbaric anarchy ... The horror, the horror...
Of course, being obvious and flattering your audience aren't necessarily problems. But there are accompanying issues. The book isn't so much a narrative as a thesis. Coetzee has something he wants to convey about South Africa, human darkness and the boundaries of rape - and he's bludgeoned his story and characters into saying it for him. Both the plot and its protagonists are consequently flimsy and unconvincing. There's no organic life to the story and Coetzee seems particularly unwilling or unable to provide anything approaching human motivation for the females in the book. This is effective in the early pages where the unfortunate Melanie is presented as clay to be moulded by the not-scrupulous-enough David Lurie. When it comes to Lurie's daughter's refusal to leave her land, confront her attackers or do something about the consequences, the inadequate insight he provides into her feelings or even rationale is a major stumbling block. There's a possible defence in that most things in the book are refracted through the egotistical eyes of David Lurie, who dominates the novel's point of view, but even his actions and motivations become increasingly unconvincing.
Coetzee's writing may be admirably terse and pared down, but he lacks restraint when it comes to presenting improbable, theatrical situations. It stretches credibility enough (to give just one instance) that Lurie should go and share a meal with the family of the girl he half-raped late on in the book - but the way the scene is played out is simply over the top. The climax comes when he bursts into a room where Melanies's sister and mother are sitting, and, we are told "with careful ceremony he gets to his knees and touches his forehead to the floor".
In short, after a promising beginning, Disgrace becomes boring. It's unconvincing, humourless and not at all challenging. In common with too many of these later Booker winners, it provides literature for people who don't really want to put any work in. Everything is spelled out slowly, obviously and at the most basic level. Readers can flatter themselves that they've caught onto some big concepts here, but really they've done no more advanced hunting and nothing more exciting than shooting fish in a barrel.
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