JM Coetzee's monument to moral symmetry

JM Coetzee's new novel is simply told but follows Vladimir Nabokov in presenting us with a world at once familiar and strange.

Adam Chang's John Coetzee

VLADIMIR Nabokov was an inveterate maker of alternative worlds. In his last major work, Ada, published in 1971, he blended the Russia of his childhood with the post-war America to which he had been obliged to flee in 1939.

In this realm, named Antiterra, electricity has been banned but plane travel still exists. The British Empire endures, though much of Canada has been annexed by a pan-oriental power known as Tartary.

In Ada, Nabokov rewrites the modern history of Europe and the Americas in a way that illuminates the creative freedom of the author. Yet, though it is a sovereign zone of the imagination, it is not designed solely for the author's pleasure. We, inhabitants of Terra, the "real" world, can't help but see our own circumstances reflected in that mirror. Its distortions serve to shake us out of ways of seeing so habitual as to amount to a kind of blindness.

JM Coetzee's new novel is the most simply told of his fictions to date. It is also the most complex and subtle in broader implication. It follows Nabokov in presenting us with a world at once familiar and strange. In its opening pages we meet an older man, Simon, and a boy, David, who have come to an unnamed country by boat, spent time in a desert tent camp and been granted new names and official papers, allowing them to live in a coastal city called Novilla.

The welcome offered by this new land is benevolent yet distracted, marked at some moments by bureaucratic intransigence, at others by simple acts of kindness. It nonetheless offers the pair opportunities for work and education. It gives them a chance to remake themselves.

Many of these references will suggest to readers a version of contemporary Australia, the author's adoptive home. But in Novilla Spanish is spoken, the populace is vegetarian and horse-drawn carts coexist with cars. Coetzee is frugal with more specific information about the land in which Simon and David find themselves. But, as with many of the fictions that date from Coetzee's residence in this country, there is a sense of being in limbo, a place aslant history.

But Coetzee's chosen title - The Childhood of Jesus - could not be more definitive. It refers to a story that has deeper roots in Western culture than any other. It recalls us to the New Testament, that ur-text from which all secular texts descend. Even the act of criticism, of venturing to elucidate the meanings of a text such as Coetzee's, emerges from biblical hermeneutics: the study of a single, sacred book.

What is more, the narrative of The Childhood of Jesus describes figures and events that chime with the account of the Gospels. Simon is not the biological father of David (a David who has emerged from a camp named Belstar). He is older; indeed, he feels ageless: in other words, a combination of the human and divine fathers of Jesus. David has lost his mother, even any documents relating to her: his may as well have been a virgin birth. The novel is initially impelled by Simon's determination to find the boy's mother. But when he does, the woman is a childless stranger, a circumstance never adequately explained.

The reader could go on for pages, identifying instances where intimations of David's special nature are presented and where phrases or episodes from Christ's life are borrowed. These intertextual relations operate on the largely featureless realm of Novilla like super-magnets. They are overwhelmingly powerful referents. And it is because of their dogmatic assertion that x equals y that we should be wary of them, especially since there is a further layer to Coetzee's work, one that points to a more secular reading.

For, just as my computer's spellcheck attempts to autocorrect Novilla to novel, so too does the figure of Simon obliquely refer to a more earthly creator. Simon's name is spelled with an Spanish accent over the o, turning the first phoneme into a C-sound. The Senor C of Coetzee's 2009 novel Diary of a Bad Year is here recycled as an allophone: C-man.

Coetzee's is not the only authorial presence in The Childhood of Jesus. The other is Cervantes, the 16th-century Spanish author and playwright whose Don Quixote is considered the first modern novel and whose influence on Spanish was so great that it came to be known as the "language of Cervantes".

It is a children's edition of Don Quixote, given to David by Simon and referred to often throughout the narrative, that provides The Childhood of Jesus with a counterbalance to those more overt religious associations: not just in the embedding of secular parables, drawn directly from Cervantes's text, that suggest our certain beliefs may be a kind of fantasy or madness designed to give meaning to a world that has none, but also in the texture of the novel's prose.

Questions have always been a crucial part of Coetzee's rhetorical strategy. It is the postmodern author's version of the rising intonation used by the young to turn all discourse into a mode of scepticism regarding grand or absolute claims. In these pages a tissue of claim and counterclaim rehearses perplexities - arising from clashes between the personal and the social, the beautiful and the good, animal existence and the examined life - that have appeared elsewhere in Coetzee's work, but never before held in such perfect tension.

The novel is a monument to moral symmetry, a cathedral of balanced cards.

It would be wrong to conclude that Coetzee interrupts the course of the narrative to pose such conundrums. Rather, they inhere in the story's progress. As Simon and David attempt to establish a life for themselves, then set out to discover the whereabouts of David's mother, such abstractions intermingle with the tale Coetzee has to tell. Philosophy, for the author, is something that emerges organically; it is bred from character and action rather than bare intellection, and it is all the more powerful for it.

The temptation, when faced with a book as conceptually rich and as brilliantly wrought as The Childhood of Jesus, is to describe it as a masterpiece. That would be to succumb to a hazy reverence of a kind antithetical to the author's project. Nowhere since Disgrace have the architectural structure of Coetzee's fiction, the import and music of his words, been so reverberantly interlinked. Yet Coetzee's work insists that a too easy submission to myths of romantic creativity is religious mania transposed on to a profane realm.

Instead the novel suggests that we are creatures spoken by language and narrative, not the other way round. And it explores the sense of vertigo that opens inside us when we attempt to test the supreme fictions from which our reality is made. Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote of Don Quixote: "Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be written." Or, as Alvaro, the senior stevedore of the Novilla docks who employs Simon, replies when the immigrant apologises for his poor command of the local tongue: "As for your Spanish, don't worry, persist. One day it will cease to feel like a language, it will become the way things are."

The Childhood of Jesus
By JM Coetzee 
Text Publishing, 288pp, $34.99 (HB)

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.