It must have been hard to grow up in apartheid South Africa: how do you acquire the subtleties and uncertainties of an adult sensibility in a land where all social negotiations are coarsened by a savagely regressive system, and infantile certainties are daily reinforced by a demonstration that might makes right? Coetzee's unnamed narrator is a young man who means to do his growing up elsewhere. A student, he lives a bare, ascetic life, self-sufficient and devoid of emotional warmth. 'He is proving something: that each man is an island; that you don't need parents.' He aims for London, where he will get a job, save money, then become a writer. He leaves his native land with one death on his conscience, that of his child, aborted by its mother after the most coldly casual of relationships.

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