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Booker club
Booker club: Life and Times of Michael K
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 B
I'm surprised it won
Sam Jordison Advertisement

Tue 16 Jun 2009 13.02 BST

14 years old

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.

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 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.
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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?

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

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 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.
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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.

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 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.
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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

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 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.
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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

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 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.
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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

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 to give a prize. Especially in a competition against Graham Swift's
Waterland.

Next time: More chronological complication as I jump forward to AS

Byatt's Possession to join in with John Mullan's Guardian book club.

Topics
Books / Booker club
Booker prize / JM Coetzee / Fiction / blogposts

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