Review | Book review: J.M. Coetzee’s 13th novel is not straightforward at all
Tome's provocative title might seem to promise an allegorical account of a young Jesus, but readers are in for a surprise
By J.M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a literary prize in want of a winner must usually nominate J.M. Coetzee. A Nobel laureate and the first novelist to win two Man Booker prizes, he has been longlisted again for his 13th novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. The title is a provocation, although slightly less so when one realises it is a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus. What next? The Postgraduate Research of Jesus? The Unpaid Internships of Jesus?
Readers expecting a straightforward take on the story of Christ are in for a surprise. Clues to Coetzee’s destabilising method are contained in his epigraph from Don Quixote, “Algunos dicen: nunca segunda partes fueron buenas”, a near-proverb that roughly means, “Some say: sequels never work out well.”
There’s a lot of cheek here, and not only because Coetzee doesn’t offer a translation. Cervantes originally inserted the phrase into the second part of his comic masterpiece. Coetzee himself may be alluding archly to the bafflement that greeted the first instalment of his.
In that book, a man named Simón “adopts” a five-year-old boy, Davíd, while both are sailing from an unspecified, but possibly South American, location. They land in Novilla, a socialist paradise that, as frequently happens with socialist paradises, turns rotten. Simón works as a stevedore, has an affair with Elena, and meets Inés, whom he decides is Davíd’s mother. Putting flesh on these bones are hints that Davíd possesses special powers (one of which is to read Don Quixote), and arcane debates about numerology and philosophy.