TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924472.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.6 KB | 83 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 88

Malignancies


AGE OF IRON
by J.M. Coetzee
Random House; 198 pages; $18.95


    At the heart of J.M. Coetzee's disturbing new novel is the
stark image of cancer, a malignant disease that takes little
pity on its victim as it ravages and destroys. The narrator of
the tale is Mrs. Curren, a white South African widow of the
liberal variety who is being eaten from within by a cancer she
knows will shortly end her life. Her physical pain and advanced
years entitle her to live out her final days in a quiet,
dignified fashion. But circumstances conspire against graceful
surrender. Separated by an ocean from her only child, she has
no one to provide the solace and daughterly ministrations she
longs for. At the same time, she is forced to contend with the
racial cancer that is eating the society that surrounds her,
stripping even its youngest members of their capacity to care,
feel or abide by the most basic rules of human decency.

    On the day Mrs. Curren returns from her doctor's office with
news confirming her death sentence, she finds in her yard
Vercueil, a foul-smelling vagrant who lives off his wits and
other people's garbage. Together they forge an unexpected
friendship that provides them both with the only breath of
kindness in a world that has forsaken its humanity. First,
however, they must surmount their differences. Mrs. Curren is
determined to fight to the last, trying to stamp out South
Africa's proliferating injustices; Vercueil wants only to
disappear into his cardboard shack without responsibility to
anyone or anything.

    But as in Coetzee's earlier works -- most notably Waiting
for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K -- the author
designs fictional landscapes where no one evades the tyranny
of a system that pits white against black and young against
old; everyone is forced to take sides. A central event involves
the murder of Bheki, 15, a youth who could have been sired by
any of today's black townships. Just days before, Mrs. Curren
watched helplessly as Bheki taunted and beat the drunken
Vercueil. "How will they treat their own children?" she scolds
Florence, her maid and Bheki's mother. "What love will they be
capable of?" "They are good children," Florence responds
without apology. "They are like iron, we are proud of them."

    Coetzee is not so forgiving. In his sharply drawn Age of
Iron, black parents who refuse to instill in their children a
respect for the sanctity of life are as responsible as the
ruthless police and indifferent whites for spawning youths who
"start by being careless of their own lives and end by being
careless of everyone else's."

    Coetzee is at his most surefooted when he crisply narrates
events, letting the horror speak for itself. Too often,
however, he seems not to trust the reader, stating and
restating his distress. The story is also gilded with tedious
descriptions of Mrs. Curren's longing for her daughter, which
rely on cliches such as "the blood tug of daughter to mother,
woman to woman."

    Still, the tale brings home Coetzee's acute warning that
black comradeship is "nothing but a mystique of death, of
killing and dying." Early in the book, Mrs. Curren tells
Florence, "You are showing Bheki and his friends that they can
raise their hands against their elders with impunity." When
Mrs. Curren later collapses in the street, only to be
indifferently probed by three small children in search of money
and gold teeth, readers finally taste the iron for themselves.


By Jill Smolowe.