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Youth. JM Coetzee. Secker & Warburg.
£14.99 UK, HB. A short novel told in the present tense, though set in the late 50s and early 60s, JM Coetzee's semi-autobiographical Youth tells the story of a young South African who leaves his embattled homeland for a literary future in London. In this, it is both a history of the time and a fable on the perils of the artistic life. The central character is John, a mathematics student in his late teens, attracted by the romance of writing as much as by the practice of it, and feeling himself powerless in most other ways. When, for instance, an encounter with an older woman leads to her moving in with him, 'he cannot remember inviting her: he has merely failed to resist.' Feeling that South Africa is on the brink of total revolution, following the Sharpeville massacre, he heads off to London, but his journey has far more to do with Romantic notions about art and literature than with any political realisation. (In the background, too, there is an overbearing mother, and John is happy to leave his brother 'to take on the burden of loving her.') The irony of John's story is that in wishing to know himself, he is really running away, determined always to reinvent himself, and heedless of the hurt he leaves in his wake. Presented with the possibility of flesh and blood relationships, instead he safely indulges himself, the way youth can afford to do, in abstractions. 'If misery were to be abolished, he would not know what to do with himself,' Coetzee writes, as John loses sight of his goal and ends up as a computer programmer, looking for someone to blame. His hero is the broken heart of the late 20th century, a misfit, groping for what he cannot reach and rejecting love as something that will tie him down. Coetzee's fascinating novel does not judge
him, nor is it particularly sympathetic. But it reminds us of
the dangers of the artist's way, and of the power of vision to
obscure as much as to reveal. © copyright Pat Boran
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