Craving fire and ardour
Hilary Mantel
YOUTH by J. M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg, pp. I69, ISBN 0436205823
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.
For the sake of art, he plans to embrace
'exile, obscure labour, and obloquy'. In London he lives, like one of Dostoevsky's protagonists. 'on the brink of psychic collapse' but in outward respectability, working as a junior programmer for IBM. Eliot worked for a bank, he reminds himself, and Kafka for an insurance company. All the same, were their lives as passionless as his? He meets women, but not his muse. His work bores him and the sulphurous London winter eats away at his sense of purpose. He is searching for a shape, waiting to be transformed into an artist by some power outside himself. On a practical basis, he knows he has miscalculated: his earning power is not sufficient to buy him the creative furlough he has planned. His situation is a very particular one, but Coetzee's novel, with its cast of the isolated and estranged, is spare enough to accommodate a range of withering uncertainties.
It is the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The young man goes on a CND demonstration. The public parade of passion repels him. He is embarrassed by his native land and wishes it eradicated. He wishes the Russians would invade it. What would happen then? He doesn't need to provide an answer; 'he is not interested in politics'. After a year with IBM he resigns. Now come the 'days of silence'; he keeps a count of the days when he speaks to no one. He feels an outsider, uncouth, like an orphan waiting to be taken in. Sometimes he feels he has passed into a frozen middle age, devoid of expectations. Sometimes he feels like a child. Much social intercourse seems to him like a puppet show or fraud, gov
erned by fraudulent conventions. Denied love, denied intimacy, he thinks of himself as a misery specialist; but surely he should be feeling something more European, such as 'angst'? He craves the fire and ardour of Provence; as an appeal to the southern gods to visit and inspire him, he fries his fish fingers in olive oil and sprinkles them with garlic salt.
He gets another computer job, out in Bracknell. He finds himself working at Aldermaston for the Ministry of Defence, a foot soldier in the Cold War. He dreams of going to China. He cannot or will not write. He has not the strength of will to live with the artist's eternal difficulty: the gap between intention and product, the inability to be true to oneself, however honourable the intention. Only art will give his life meaning, but his life is too meaningless to give birth to art. He can't manage the simple things: coupling, the regular intake of food. He watches with fascination as an Indian co-worker, too impractical to learn to cook, dwindles away on a diet of bananas. His own appetites are dysfunctional and unappeased. His spirit erodes day by day.
What will happen to this young man, whom the story leaves at the age of 24? No doubt, yearning for the transcendent, he will settle for the quotidian. You may laugh at his priggishness or pity his loneliness. You may think that his apprentice path has been walked over and over, for 200 years. But Coetzee's solemn intensity, the magisterial calm and clarity of his prose, illuminate the hazards of every step.
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