So here it is: the gospel according to JM Coetzee. A man and a boy arrive at a resettlement centre, in an unnamed country where they know no one, looking for employment and a place to live. The man is old and people assume, wrongly, that the boy is his grandson. "Not my grandson, not my son," he explains to those who ask. "But I am responsible for him." They have come from "the camp" in the desert, where they learnt Spanish, the language of the country, and were assigned new names. The boy has apparently become separated from his mother on the boat over; they are "searching for family members". The officials are not helpful. A room has been assigned to them in the centre, but the key for it cannot be found. They are sent away for the night, and forced to sleep under an iron sheet in a courtyard. Cold and tired, they return to the resettlement centre in the morning, only to be told: "There are no rooms free."
Since Coetzee won the Nobel prize in 2003, his books have mostly taken the form of sly semi-autobiographical fragments. His last novel, Summertime (2009), was a series of self-lacerating biographical sketches concerning the South African novelist John Coetzee, "a little man, an unimportant little man", who closely resembles the author in some respects but not others (being dead, for example, unlike his real-life namesake). By contrast, The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous. The opening chapters bring to mind the internment camps and sinister bureaucracies of his first Booker winner, Life & Times of Michael K (1983), the story of a gardener in a counterfactual, civil war‑torn South Africa. The invented, indeterminate location of the new novel also recalls Coetzee's first international success, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), which was set on the edge of an imaginary empire, part British-controlled Africa and part ancient Rome. But whereas both of those novels clearly – if not straightforwardly – allegorised apartheid South Africa, The Childhood of Jesus is much harder to decode.
Initially, we seem to be reading a Kafkaesque version of the nativity story, with refugees playing the holy family in an uncaring host country. But it soon becomes clear that the city they have arrived in, Novilla, is far from uncaring. It is, in fact, a kind of utopia – a specifically Coetzeean version of utopia. (Asked about John Coetzee's political ideals, a character in Summertime suggests, only half-jokingly: "The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.") The old man, now known as Simón, is quickly given a job at the docks, where "all his fellow stevedores strike him as good men: hard-working, friendly, helpful". They are kind to the boy, now named David. The city's workers attend philosophy classes every night; vegetarianism is mandatory (the alternative is eating rats); the horse and cart is still in action; and football matches, like music lessons, are free ("It's football," says a colleague when Simón tries to pay. "It's a game. You don't need to pay to watch a game.") When Simón points out that the sacks of grain they carry off the ships by hand could be unloaded by a crane in a tenth of the time, the foreman agrees. "But what would be the point?" he asks. "It is not as if there is an emergency, a food shortage for example."
At the same time, there are intimations that Novilla may be a spiritual rather than an earthly state. It transpires that everybody there has made the same journey: by ship, through the camp and the relocation centre. None of them can remember their earlier lives. When Simón tries to find the boy's family, he is met with disapproval: "People here have washed themselves clean of old ties," explains an official. "You should be doing the same: letting go of old attachments, not pursuing them." The Buddhist ideal of non-attachment is frequently invoked. When Simón complains about his diet of bread ("the staff of life") and flavourless bean paste, he is encouraged to "starve the dog of hunger". When he makes sexual advances to a young woman, she is surprised and disgusted; "you want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me," she complains. It's a "bloodless" world, with no meat, no spices, and no irony either.
Just as the reader adapts to this semi-Luddite socialist state/Buddhist-style afterlife, things move in a new direction. For reasons unexplained, Simón is convinced that he will know David's mother when he sees her, though they have never met. And when he locates an unsympathetic woman, who doesn't seem to be David's mother in any obvious sense, he surrenders both the child and his flat to her. The second half of the novel sees the two adults struggling with the city's educational authorities because David is disruptive, though highly intelligent; this situation is complicated by the fact that he is, to some unspecified extent, Jesus. Gospel references come at regular intervals. David inveighs against violence, calmly presenting his cheek to be slapped; he offers to give his blood; he claims that he can raise the dead. When asked to write "I must tell the truth" on the blackboard, he writes instead: "I am the truth. Yo so la veridad."
Coetzee is usually cast as a cold, austere and cerebral writer; a South African Beckett, gloomily preoccupied with the operations of power and desire. But The Childhood of Jesus emphasises another side of him: the child of the 1960s. It suggests a late-Tolstoyan drift, mystical and mildly cranky. The question of spiritual discipline has long been present in his writing: self-denial versus sensualism, the path of Jesus versus that of Byron. But in his new book, it takes a surprisingly hippyish, New Agey form. In a recent graduation speech given in South Africa, greeted with general bafflement, Coetzee encouraged the young men there to go into primary education: it will be "good for your soul", he suggested, to experience "the honesty and directness of the child". This would seem to be one of the new book's themes. It also offers many gnomic exchanges about life's big questions, notably one about "the pooness of poo":
"We are not like poo, that has to stay behind and be mixed with the earth."
"What are we like?"
"What are we like if we are not like poo? We are like ideas. Ideas never die."
One of the disconcerting features in Coetzee's writing is the combination of a high degree of philosophical sophistication with some idiosyncratic, not to say barking, ideas: I was reminded of Elizabeth Costello, in which the heroine gives a brilliant speech comparing industrial farming with the Holocaust.
The Childhood of Jesus is a very mysterious novel: I finished it impressed, intrigued and confused, without any clear sense of what it was actually about. Of course the vagueness is part of the point: Coetzee has written approvingly of the way that Beckett's novels enact "a situation well described by Heidegger's term Geworfenheit: being thrown without explanation into an existence governed by obscure rules". That is the case in Novilla, and, by extension, in life generally:
"'Why are we here?' asks the boy.
'I don't know what to say,' Simón replies. 'We are here for the same reason everyone else is. We have been given a chance to live and we have accepted that chance. It is a great thing, to live.'"
Personally, I would put The Childhood of Jesus some distance behind Coetzee's conspicuous masterpieces, such as Life & Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace (1999), and also behind the wonderful autobiographical trilogy that ended with Summertime. It probably belongs in the strange-but-interesting section, with his Crusoe story Foe (1986) and Elizabeth Costello. Like the world of Novilla, The Childhood of Jesus is bloodless and abstract. Coetzee's prose is as precise and measured as ever, its rhythms teacherly (the Coetzeean rule of three sees a fair amount of action: "It seems to him a good question, a serious question, one that might trouble the best-schooled young nun." Twenty pages later: "A good answer, a serious answer, a philosophic answer"). But it lacks the excitement that comes when he has a bit more social detail – a bit more life – to get his teeth into. A recurring complaint in Coetzee's more self-obsessed books has been that he is respected but not loved, famous but not popular, seen as "a pedant who dabbles in fiction". This book will do nothing to change that; Disgrace remains the nearest thing to a crowd-pleaser in his admirable but forbidding canon. However, The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it's richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence. His acolytes will be puzzling over it for decades.
