J M Coetzee: A terrible beauty

Speaking Volumes

Every writer on this planet earth would really like to get the Nobel Prize sometime, whether he admits it or not," wrote Pablo Neruda in his Memoirs. Even J M Coetzee, famously reticent, often described as a deeply private man who is almost cripplingly shy, admitted in a brief statement that the Prize made him "particularly happy".

Having said that much, he retreated into silence, though reports say he celebrated in private with friends at the University of Chicago, where he is currently a visiting professor.

Perhaps the Nobel Prize for Literature is accepted most gratefully by those authors who never saw themselves as front runners "" Gao Xinjiang, for instance, whom the Nobel pulled out of exile and relative obscurity, Imre Kertesz, whose name was known to perhaps a handful of admirers before he received the Prize. For a writer like Coetzee, the Prize does little to enhance an already awesome reputation "" it is a confirmation of a talent already celebrated and recognised by the world.

Neruda reacted with good-humoured grace when he won his Nobel; indeed, after years of having his name bandied about as one of the front runners, the final bestowing of the Prize was most welcome. He bore what he called "the hard task of parrying the journalists" with ease and he went through the paces of the prize-giving ceremony with tolerance, remarking on the resemblance between the ceremony and the awarding of prizes at a school's annual day.

Fittingly, a touch of the absurd was provided by a friend who sent him a series of pseudonymous telegrams threatening to cut off the tails of his coat at the ceremony in protest against the colonialist nature of the official dress required by the Nobel committee.

Even after Neruda explained to the officials at Stockholm that the threat was just a hoax, they insisted on providing him with bodyguards who remained on the alert all through the ceremony, looking out for the scissor-wielding maniac who existed only in the mischievous brain of Neruda's friend.

Samuel Beckett, conversely, reacted with genuine dismay when he was told that he'd won the Nobel. He was truly appalled at what he saw as a long-term disruption, and called it a "catastrophe". The Prize forced him to make a rare public appearance in order to allow the press to take photographs, which he agreed to on condition that he would remain silent.

Three days after the award, he appeared in front of the photographers, smoking a cigar and looking deeply uncomfortable; he stayed for barely a minute. He appointed his publisher to receive the award on his behalf and wrote, "Lindon is very kindly facing the turnips in my stead on that Nobloodybeldamday." He would continue to blame the disruption the Prize caused in his life for a slump in his writing.

The only reason he accepted the award at all was because he realised that to refuse would be to court even more frantic publicity; he had no desire to become notorious for his refusal, like Sartre.

For Coetzee, the Prize comes at a time in his career when he has begun to explore worlds so experimental that his most recent work, Elizabeth Costello, baffled this year's Booker committee. The novel stayed off the shortlist in part because the judges weren't sure that it was indeed a novel; as a piece of writing, it is difficult to classify.

Part polemic, part a deep, anguished analysis of the animal rights debate, Elizabeth Costello employs the fictional figure of a world-renowned novelist (who, like her creator, shrinks from publicity) to give voice to an internal debate. Coetzee, who has won the Booker twice before and declined to attend the ceremony on either occasion, is unlikely to be affected by the Booker panel's decision to overlook Elizabeth Costello in favour of more accessible books.

Coetzee has been described as a bleak writer, which is true, and as a pessimistic writer, which is not: he bears the burden of an unbearable honesty, a clarity of vision that will not allow him to describe anything less than the human (and now, the animal) condition, as though he were born with his eyelids nailed permanently open.

His work has a terrible beauty; he is a difficult writer to read because he can so often shake you to the core with dispassion rather than emotion. He set down his credo, his vision, years ago when he wrote The Life and Times of Michael K: "Now they have camps for children whose parents run away, camps for people who kick and foam at the mouth, camps for people who can't add two and two, camps for people who forget their papers at home . Perhaps the truth is that it is enough to be out of the camps, out of all the camps at the same time."

When Disgrace came out, it raised a furore in South Africa; the ANC launched an attack on Coetzee, calling the novel politically incorrect, demanding that he apologise for portraying the rape of a white woman by black men. It sent out a negative image of South Africa, said the ANC; Coetzee never responded publicly, but he might have said that his job as a writer was merely to tell the truth as he saw it, not to act as the ambassador of his country.

He moved to Australia shortly afterwards, in what many see as a response to the onslaught he faced in his homeland. Coetzee has never discussed it, as he has never discussed other personal tragedies "" the son who died in a fall off a balcony, the ex-wife who died after a long and harrowing battle with cancer. Both found their way into his writing, in time, and perhaps in future he will similarly transform his experience of exile.

Some see his reticence as exasperating, a refusal to engage personally in the age of the personal. But if you read Coetzee, everything you need to know about him is all there. His incorruptible insistence on telling the truth about race and country as he sees it "" especially in works like Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace.

His intense engagement with the question of what it means to be human, where we cross the lines between humanity and brutality, whether the animal, brute kingdom is not worthy of the same respect as we accord ourselves. Those who've been lucky enough to be taught by Coetzee know him as a man who withholds little of his gifts in class, who demands only that you never cease to be the sternest interlocutor of yourself.

In the last lines of his memoir, Boyhood, written in the third person, the narrator asks: "How will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?" Coetzee has spent most of his life answering that question; the Nobel Prize is merely the world's way of saying, 'thank you'.

nilroy@lycos.com