In a youthful interview, J M Coetzee once reflected to a critic that he would one day like to "write in his own voice" (the quotation is from memory). After his award of the Nobel prize for literature in 2003 - and his subsequent relocation to Australia after the publication of Disgrace - it would be strange if he did not set about evolving new rules and strategies for fiction, not all of which are successful. His last novel, Slow Man, exuded aridity and seemed caught up in the irksome circuitry of postmodernism.
DIARY OF A BAD YEAR
 By J M Coetzee231 pagesHarvill SeckerR196,80
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Diary of a Bad Year reiterates certain demands on a literary audience grown impatient with experimentalism in the novel, defaulting to the pre modernist "realist" mode of character, plot, time and place. Once that adjustment is made, though, the Diary - slowly - unveils its treasures: the sadness of waning powers, age, the continuing power of the erotic, and a quality new to Coetzee, charm.
Two things need to be said.
First, Coetzee is a magnificent writer, a true master of the English language.
Second, he requires the audience to come to him rather than spinning out the commonplaces of contemporary fiction, including the calculated bestseller. This needs some attention.
The narrator is John (or "Juan") Coetzee, an eminent novelist now in his 70s living alone in Sydney. He was once a South African but there is no suggestion of a current partner or former family. In this, as in a number of ways, "Coetzee" is not just older than J M Coetzee but appears to have an alternate history.
Perhaps he is little to be pitied; but he has a magisterial intelligence, and has been commissioned to write a series of "opinions" for a German publisher. These small essays are reproduced, and may or may not represent the actual writer's views. (Like his earlier character, Michael K, Coetzee is as shy and elusive as a camouflaged creature of the wild.)
The opinions are strong, often magnificently expressed. Apart from the hatred of America's war in Iraq and its lying premises - allied with powerful antipathy to Australia's connivance in the conflict and its treatment of refugees - there are some familiar tropes: vegetarianism, paedophilia, the nature of restitution after colonialism, and a dislike of all modern music. Here and there, though, paragraphs leap into a higher cognitive frame, such as this on creationism:
"As long as there is not one of us who has the faintest idea about how to go about constructing a housefly from scratch, how can we disparage as intellectually naive the conclusion that the housefly must have been put together by an intelligence of a higher order than our own?"
The texts of Coetzee's opinions are, as it were, infiltrated by two other voices - represented by dissecting the printed page into halves and thirds. One presence is of the young woman who takes upon Coetzee's typing for him (his eyes are bad), and for whom he impossibly yearns. The other is a thuggish consort of the woman who wishes to rob Coetzee of his money (through spyware). These interventions grow until they become entangled with the more orthodox Coetzee essays.
Some readers will revolt against this almost mathematical representation of fiction. But those who persevere will find the woman, Anya, a free and joyous spirit who assists the old man in embarking on his final voyage. As their lives interact, the Diary achieves a life-affirming closure. The final pages are among the most beautiful Coetzee has ever written.
It will probably be received with a measure of disdain by younger writers; but what unfolds is the narrative of a writer starting again - repudiating repetition - and bearing his labours with duty and integrity.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
