In a Cold Country

Michael Wood

• BuyDiary of a Bad Year by J.M. Coetzee
  Harvill, 231 pp, £16.99, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 84655 120 8
• BuyInner Workings: Essays 2000-2005 by J.M. Coetzee
  Harvill, 304 pp, £17.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 1 84655 045 4

A new novel by J.M. Coetzee is always an event, although often a disconcerting one. ‘Disconcerting’ will be too polite a word for many readers, who can’t bear the chill that emanates from these works, especially Disgrace (1999), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005). The same chill can be picked up in Coetzee’s critical essays, where it is likely to appear as offhand authority. A poem by Paul Celan, we learn in the collection Inner Workings, ‘absorbs from the Surrealists everything that is worth absorbing’. So much for those excitable fellows with their politics and their attempts to reimagine the world. I’m a devoted admirer of the fiction but I do have some difficulty with the bleak emotional weather of autobiographical works such as Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Coetzee may not actively seek this response, but he can hardly be surprised by it. In Diary of a Bad Year a character who closely resembles the author – more of this figure later – imagines his father’s opinion of him. ‘A selfish child, he must have thought, who has turned into a cold man; and how can I deny it?’