I am having a really poor run at the moment – this was the latest of a series of disappointing novels, in many ways the worst of the lot! It was Coetzee’s first Booker Prize winner, the other being Disgrace in 1999.
Life & Times of Michael K is set in a dystopian South Africa in which a civil war is being fought. The protagonist Michael K is born with a hare lip. He is also what was once thought of as “simple” and although not an orphan was effectively abandoned as a child and sent to live in an institution. A doctor who later treats him explains:
He is a simpleton, and not even an interesting simpleton. He is a poor help
less soul who has been permitted to wander out on the battlefield, if I may use that word, the battlefield of life, when he should have been shut away in an institution with high walls, stuffing cushions or watering the flower beds
In many ways this is a simple journey story. Michael works as a gardener and his mother is an ailing domestic servant. Law and order is breaking down in the coastal city where they live. Michael’s mother persuades him to help her escape the conflict and privations of the city and take her on a biblical exodus to her home town near the mountains. She dies during the journey, but Michael continues his pilgrimage alone, carrying her ashes with him. He settles in an abandoned farmstead, living off the land and making rudimentary attempts to grow food.
Michael’s time in the wilderness also has biblical overtones – his attempts to scratch a living from the surface of the earth is a hard, unremitting grind for the reader. The allegorical nature of Michael’s suffering is subtle but nevertheless unavoidable – this must be an allegory because otherwise it would be utterly meaningless.
Eventually he is captured as an undocumented citizen, suspected of working for the resistance, and sent to a prison camp. By now his fragile health has deteriorated further, and he appears to be starving. I haven’t been able to locate the original source of this claim, but I have read that Coetzee has said in interviews that the inspiration for this novel was a newspaper article about a captured panda that refused to eat the food it was fed in captivity. Once captured Michael K adopts the same approach, although there is no suggestion that this is a hunger strike or anything other than an illness. It is more an inability to eat than a refusal. He continues to lose weight, and the doctor who narrates the novel’s second section struggles unsuccessfully to understand his motivation for refusing food. I wasn’t comfortable with the portrayal of an illness as a philosophical protest or existential statement.
Michael eventually escapes from the camp, and in the last section returns to the city. He meets some vagrants who appear more attuned to life outside civilisation, and who effectively adopt him. At this point, with no suggestion that Michael has come to any resolution of his situation, the novel ends abruptly and inconclusively.
It is hard to care for Michael K. He is passive and has nothing of interested to say about his experiences. It is possible we are intended to see him as a Forrest Gump-like figure, with his simple lifestyle and even simpler thought processes giving us insights into the human condition. If that was the intention then I can’t say it worked. Towards the end of the novel Michael acquires a more analytical monologue which for some reviewers sits unconvincingly with his former passivity and incomprehension. His thoughts become positively philosophical:
How fortunate that I have no children, he thought: how fortunate that I have no desire to father. I would not know what to do with a child out here in the heart of the country, who would need milk and clothes and friends and schooling. I would fail in my duties, I would be the worst of fathers. Whereas it is not hard to live a life that consists merely of passing time. I am one of the fortunate ones who escape being called.
Michael is an innocent adrift in a world of sin and corruption, but my appetite for parables is a bit jaded at the moment – perhaps I need some escapism and an interesting story instead? The New York Times said in a review that Coetzee’s theme in this novel is “the wild and merciless power of inanity.” If you are looking for a novel about the inane then look no more, this is the one.
The Reading Bug 