Once more with less feeling

Diary of a Bad Year
by J. M. Coetzee

In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the main character, David Lurie, helps to put down homeless dogs. He places their remains in black plastic bags and takes them to the incinerator. Until then, Lurie has not shown himself to be the most sympathetic character; but now, as he performs his grim task, he tries ‘to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love.’

The main character in Coetzee’s latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, dreams about a woman coming to ‘soften the impact of his death’. At the novel’s end, a woman does indeed promise to fly to Sydney to be at his bedside when he dies. ‘I can’t go with you, I will say to him, but what I will do is hold your hand as far as the gate,’ she says. ‘And I will clean up afterwards.’

In some ways Diary of a Bad Year feels like Disgrace all over again, but in a different register: this time self-reflective, political, literary. It is much the inferior book, but it remains a fascinating piece of writing.

It takes the form of a set of ‘strong opinions’ (a nod to Nabokov) by a celebrated 72-year-old writer. These are accompanied, in the bottom half of each page, by more casual narratives in two different voices: the same writer, ‘off-duty’, and his typist, an alluring, sympathetic young woman who lives in the same apartment block. The three narratives inflect each other in various ways — sometimes to leaven with humour, other times to ironise or undermine.

Initially irritated by him, the typist slowly warms to her employer.