A Book to Discover:No. 1:
The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M Coetzee
Review taken from The New York Times 1983.
Review by Cynthia Ozick
In ''Life & Times of Michael K,'' J. M. Coetzee, a South African born in 1940, has rewritten the travail of Huck's insight, but from Nigger Jim's point of view, and set in a country more terrible - because it is a living bitter hardhearted contemporary place, the parable-world of an unregenerate soon-after-now, with little pity and no comedy. Conscience, insight, innocence: Michael K cannot aspire to such high recognitions - he is ''dull,'' his mind is ''not quick.'' He was born fatherless and with a disfigurement: a harelip that prevented him from being nourished at his mother's breast. When he needs some tools to make a cart to transport his dying mother, he breaks into a locked shed and takes them. The smallest transgression, undetected and unpunished, the single offense of life; yet nearly every moment of his life is judged as if he were guilty of some huge and undisclosed crime - not for nothing is his surname resonant with the Kafkan ''K.'' His crime is his birth. When as a schoolchild he is perplexed by long division, he is ''committed to the protection'' of a state-run orphanage for the ''variously afflicted.'' From then on he is consistently protected - subject to curfews, police permits, patrols, convoys, sentries, guns, a work camp with wire fences, a semi-benevolent prison hospital: tyranny, like his school, ''at the expense of the state.''
Though a mote in the dustheap of society, he is no derelict. From the age of 15 he has worked as a gardener in a public park in Cape Town. His worn and profoundly scrupulous mother also lives honorably; she is a domestic servant for a decent enough elderly couple in a posh seaside apartment house. They have gone to the trouble of keeping a room for her - an unused basement storage closet without electricity or ventilation. Her duties end at eight o'clock at night six days a week. When she falls ill, she is dependent on the charity of her employers. The building is attacked, vandalized, the residents driven out. Michael K is laid off. The country is at war.
The purpose of the war, from one standpoint - that of a reasonable-minded prison-master - is ''so that minorities will have a say in their destinies.'' This is indisputably the language of democratic idealism. In a South African context such a creed unexpectedly turns Orwellian: It means repression of the black majority by the white minority. Yet in Mr. Coetzee's tale we are not told who is black and who is white, who is in power and who is not. Except for the reference to Cape Town and to place-names that are recognizably Afrikaans, we are not even told that this is the physical and moral landscape of South Africa. We remain largely uninstructed because we are privy solely to Michael K's heart, an organ that does not deal in color or power, a territory foreign to abstractions and doctrines; it knows only what is obvious and elemental. Though there is little mention anywhere of piety or faith, and though it is the prison-masters alone who speak sympathetically and conscientiously of rights and of freedom, Michael K responds only to what appears to be divinely ordered - despite every implacable decree and man-made restraint. He names no tyranny and no ideal. He cares for his mother; he cares for the earth; he will learn how they come to the same in the end.
COETZEE is a writer of clarifying inventiveness and translucent conviction. Both are given voice gradually, seepingly, as if time itself were a character in the narrative. ''There is time enough for everything.'' As in his previous novel, ''Waiting for the Barbarians,'' Mr. Coetzee's landscapes of suffering are defined by the little-by-little art of moral disclosure - his stories might be about anyone and anyplace. At the same time they defy the vice of abstraction; they are engrossed in the minute and the concrete. It would be possible, following Mr. Coetzee's dazzlingly precise illuminations, to learn how to sow, or use a pump, or make a house of earth. The grain of his sentences is flat and austere, but also so purifying to the senses that one comes away feeling that one's eye has been sharpened, one's hearing vivified, not only for the bright proliferations of nature, but for human unexpectedness.
With laborious tenderness, with intelligent laboriousness - how unexpectedly intelligent he is! - Michael K builds a crude hand-drawn vehicle to restore his mother to a lost place that has become the frail ephemeral Eden of her illness, no more substantial than a vision: a bit of soil with a chicken-run, where she remembers having once been happy in childhood. This patch is only five hours away, but without a permit they may not go by train. No permit arrives. They set out clandestinely, the young man heaving the weight of his old mother in the cart, dodging military convoys, hiding, the two of them repeatedly assaulted by cold and bad weather and thugs with knives. To Michael K at the start of the journey, brutality and danger and stiffness of limb and rain seem all the same; tyranny feels as natural an ordeal as the harshness of the road.
On the road his mother deteriorates so piteously that Michael K must surrender her to a hospital. There he is shunted aside and she dies. Without consultation her body is cremated and given back to him, a small bundle of ashes in a plastic bag. He holds his mother's dust and imagines the burning halo of her hair. Then, still without permission, he returns her to the place of her illumination and buries her ashes. It is a grassy nowhere, a guess, the cloudrack of a dream of peace, the long- abandoned farm of a departed Afrikaaner family, a forgotten and unrecorded spot fallen through the brute mesh of totalitarian surveillance.
And here begins the parable of Michael K's freedom and resourcefulness; here begins Michael K's brief bliss. He is Robinson Crusoe, he is the lord of his life. It is his mother's own earth; it is his motherland; he lives in a womblike burrow; he tills the fruitful soil. Miracles sprout from a handful of discovered seeds: ''Now two pale green melons were growing on the far side of the field. It seemed to him that he loved these two, which he thought of as two sisters, even more than the pumpkins, which he thought of as a band of brothers. Under the melons he placed pads of grass so that their skins should not bruise.'' He eats with deep relish, in the fulfillment of what is ordained: the work of his hands, a newfound sovereignty over his own hands and the blessing of fertility in his own scrap of ground. ''I am becoming a different kind of man,'' he reflects. For the first time he is unprotected. When he has grown almost unafraid, civilization intrudes.
A whining boy who is a runaway solder takes over the farmhouse and declares himself in need of a servant. A group of guerrillas and their donkeys pass through by night and trample the seedlings. Michael K flees; he is picked up as a ''parasite'' and confined to a work camp. But because he has lived in the field as a free man - in the field ''he was not a prisoner or a castaway . . . he was himself'' - he has learned how to think and judge. ''What if the hosts were far outnumbered by the parasites, the parasites of idleness and the other secret parasites in the army and the police force and the schools and the factories and offices, the parasites of the heart? Could the parasites then be called parasites? Parasites too had flesh and substance; parasites too could be preyed upon.''
From the seed of freedom Michael K has raised up a metaphysics. It is not the coarse dogma of a killer-rebel or a terrorist; he does not join the guerrillas. He sees vulnerable children on all sides - the runaway who wants to be taken care of, the careless insurgents who are like ''young men come off the field after a hard game,'' even the young camp guard with diabetes, callous and threatening, yet willing to share his food, who will end up as a prisoner himself. ''How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?''
But behind the gate Michael K cannot eat, cannot swallow, cannot get nourishment, and now Mr. Coetzee turns his parable to one of starvation. Repression wastes. Tyranny makes skeletons. Injustice will be vomited up. ''Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom,'' says a doctor in the camp for ''rehabilitation'' where Michael K is next incarcerated. His body is ''crying to be fed its own food, and only that.'' Behind the wire fences of a politics organized by curfew and restriction, where essence is smothered by law, and law is lie, Michael K is set aside as a rough mindless lost unfit creature, a simpleton or idiot, a savage. It is a wonder, the doctor observes, that he has been able to keep himself alive. He is ''the runt of the cat's litter,'' ''the obscurest of the obscure.'' Thus the judgment of benevolent arrogance - or compassion indistinguishable from arrogance - on the ingenious farmer and visionary free man of his mother's field.
If ''Life & Times of Michael K'' has a flaw, it is in the last-minute imposition of an interior choral interpretation. In the final quarter we are removed, temporarily, from the plain seeing of Michael K to the self-indulgent diary of the prison doctor who struggles with the entanglements of an increasingly abusive regime. But the doctor's commentary is superfluous; he thickens the clear tongue of the novel by naming its ''message'' and thumping out ironies. For one thing, he spells out what we have long ago taken in with the immediacy of intuition and possession. He construes, he translates: Michael K is ''an original soul . . . untouched by doctrine, untouched by history . . . evading the peace and the war . . . drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does.'' All this is redundant. The sister- melons and the brother-pumpkins have already had their eloquent say. And the lip of the child kept from its mother's milk has had its say. And the man who grows strong and intelligent when he is at peace in his motherland has had his say.
Mr. Coetzee's subdued yet urgent lament is for the sadness of a South Africa that has made dependents and parasites and prisoners of its own children, black and white. (Not to mention more ambiguously imprisoned groups: Indians, ''colored,'' the troubled and precarious Jewish community.) Moreover, Mr. Coetzee makes plain that the noble endurances and passionate revelations of Michael K are not to be taken for a covert defense of terrorism; although he evades no horrors, existing or to come, Mr. Coetzee has not written a symbolic novel about the inevitability of guerrilla war and revolution in a country where oppression and dependency are breathed with the air. Instead, he discloses, in the language of imagination, the lumbering hoaxes and self- deceptions of stupidity. His theme is the wild and merciless power of inanity. Michael K suffers from the obdurate callowness of both sides, rulers and rebels - one tramples the vines, the other blows up the pump. At the end of the story, he dreams of drinking the living water drawn out of his mother's earth, if only drop by drop, if only from a teaspoon.
For the sake of the innocent, time is Mr. Coetzee's hope.
Cynthia Ozick
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