Is Coetzee, a Nobel prize winner admired around the world for the rigour and sensitivity of his writing, indulging in a prolonged intellectual joke here, or does he genuinely believe this is how others view him?
His skill at getting under the skin of his five separate characters is undeniable. Each voice is rendered with such empathy and concision, he seems at times to be almost showing off, reminding us just how good he can be when limiting himself to a more conventional form of fiction. The problem is that the further we go down these narrative byways, the more interested we become in these cameo portraits and the more indifferent we become to Coetzee himself. And then, just as we are in danger of being permanently absorbed by the individual story of Margot, Sophie or Adriana, the author brings it to an abrupt end and switches to a new tale, reminding us that these are illusions of his own making. These witnesses are worse than unreliable, their unflattering insights are figments of Coetzee’s imagination. The artifice is suddenly made visible, the reader uncomfortably aware of falling victim to a complex exercise in authorial manipulation.
Summertime has been longlisted for the Man Booker. If it is chosen, Coetzee will become the first writer to have won the prize three times. Does it deserve to? One admires the art. The writer’s ironic detachment, his playful tweaking of narrative conventions and readers’ expectations, causes a wry curl of the lip. But at the end the reader is left hungering for some form of resolution, an end to this game of bluff and double-bluff. No one is obliged to write a memoir. When an author does so, he probably owes it to his audience to answer a basic question: who is he? Coetzee, in these pages, only deigns to flirt with the notion.
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