Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease

Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you his meaning directly. Always left it to you to puzzle things out.’ That verdict surely applies not only to the trio of gnomic novels that ends with The Death of Jesus. It fits the entirety of John Coetzee’s utterly lucid yet fiendishly elusive work. The South African Nobel laureate, resident in Australia since 2001, began his weird, stark but oddly hypnotic series of stories about an immigrant to a Spanish-speaking land and the ‘exceptional child’ he adopts with The Childhood of Jesus in 2013. The Schooldays of Jesus followed, and saw the gifted but brattish David shine as a prodigious dancer in the care of his often nonplussed guardian, Simón, and devoted adoptive mother, Inés.

The self-spoiling title of this final episode reveals the fate of the ten-year-old wonder. David insists that ‘I am nobody’s child’, but leaves his grieving followers with a sense that they have been ‘visited by a comet’. Yet Christianity — and the Gospel narratives inflect all these tales of a charismatic little stirrer who dwells among ‘ordinary folk, out of their depth’ — seems not to exist in the officious, ramshackle southern country where Simón and Inés live. This sharply etched dreamland blends elements of Argentina, Australia and even, I surmise, the threadbare Cape Town suburbia of Coetzee’s youth.

Like its predecessors, The Death of Jesus dangles the juicy worm of a clear-cut allegory in front of its perplexed readers. Then it snatches away the bait. We flounder around for meaning, for pattern, as in the vortex-like pools — so clear, yet so unfathomable — of his great novels, from Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K to Disgrace.