No hope for Elizabeth or South Africa

Francis King

AGE OF IRON by J.M. Coetzee

Secker &Warburg, £12.99, pp.181

Awhite South African woman, a re- tired university lecturer in Latin, learns from her doctor that she is terminally ill with cancer — news 'for me to take in my arms and fold to my chest and take home, without headshaking, without tears'. Once home, she finds that, in a 'house' con- structed out of cartons and plastic sheeting, one of the many derelicts of Cape Town has taken up residence in an alley which runs beside her garage. Tall, thin, with 'long, carious fangs' and reeking of booze and urine, he is an unlikely Angel of Death; but that is what he proves to be for Elizabeth Curren, as he accompanies rather than conducts her personal Inferno to that moment when, chilled to the marrow, she wakes up in the bed which they share and says to him 'Is it time?' and knows, without his answering, that it is.

This personal Inferno is partly one of physical agony which drugs can only briefly alleviate, and partly one of a country careening off uncontrollably into a chaos of violence and self-destruction. The woman being slowly devoured by cancer is a microcosm of South Africa being slowly devoured by racial and tribal strife. Repeat- edly she sees her cancer as a monstrous foetus, remorselessly growing within her, which she struggles in vain to bring to birth. South Africa is similarly struggling to bring to birth a just society and is similarly doomed to failure. The labour pains of woman and country are equally terrible and equally fruitless.

The cancer devouring the woman is also that most destructive of emotions, guilt: guilt not for her own deeds of omission or commission but for those of the white society of which she has for so long been a part, enjoying its privileges and pleasures. What fully awakens this previously drows- ing guilt is a series of incidents precipitated by her black woman servant, the servant's adolescent son, and the son's former schoolmate and fellow conspirator in insur- rection against the government. When the two boys are on the run from the police, the white woman suddenly finds that her sympathies are not with the whites but with them. In search of one of them, she ventures, dishevelled, hysterical and often in agony from her illness, into a shanty- town in which her courageous presence is resented, not applauded, by the inhabi- tants. Providing shelter for the other boy, she becomes an object of suspicion to the security forces, who ransack her house.

The details of Elizabeth's quest in the shanty-town and of her increasing involve- ment with a world, previously strange to her, of revolutionary violence and repress- ion, are those of a realistic novel; but it is difficult to see her whole story as other than an allegory. The narrative is pre- sented as though it were her testament to her only child, a daughter, now living happily in the United States. But in a

'These should stop your sexual fantasies about me. .

realistic novel this daughter would surely sometimes telephone to her dying mother to ask how she was faring; and there would surely be friends, neighbours and former colleagues who would also telephone or call at the house. Elizabeth is wholly alone,but for her Angel of Death and but for the black people whom she wishes to help but who regard her at best with ridicule and contempt and at worst with a murderous loathing, just as white South Africa is wholly alone, abandoned to the 'Age of Iron' which gives the book its title. White South Africa must become recon- ciled to its inevitable and agonising death, the author seems to be telling us, just as Elizabeth must become reconciled to her no less inevitable and agonising one.

This is not a book for the squeamish.

Since its subject is the dissolution of both its central character and the nation of which she is a part, it is full of descriptions of decay and squalor. The mysterious Mr Vercueil, Elizabeth's Angel of Death, is not the sort of person many of us would invite into our houses, much less into our beds; but if she is to achieve a good death and the peace of an ultimate reconciliation with the hostile and dreaded world about her, then she must learn to embrace this repellent, taciturn figure and his way of life without any horror or hatred.

No less sickening than the descriptions of the squalor are those of the violence.

Before his death, one of the two black boys is seriously injured when a police driver deliberately uses his van to unseat him and his friend from their bicycles. Elizabeth first staunches the blood of what she imagines to be a fatal wound, and then, when the boy has seemingly disappeared forever, searches a hospital for him. Later the other boy is shot — whether by the security forces or by his fellow blacks, is not clear — and Elizabeth views his blood- spattered corpse.

There is a certain sameness of theme in the books which now emanate from white South African writers. There was not a parallel sameness of theme in the works which emanated from Soviet and East European dissenting writers in the period before the thaw. Paradoxically, the exist- ence of a rigid censorship in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may, in this respect at least, have been beneficial: writers had to seek for metaphors in their attacks on the evils of the societies in which they found themselves, and those metaphors were more surprising and there- fore more interesting than straightforward

transcriptions. But if the world of Age of

Iron is all too reminiscent of the world of Nadime Gordimer Athol Fugard and Andre Brink (to name but three), the writing, so spare, so strong, so iron-hard, is wholly and magnificently original.

There is no hope in this book for either Elizabeth or South Africa; but there is ample hope for the future of the novel when writers like Coetzee are around.