Disgrace

Disgrace Review

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

A terse and gripping novel, though the tension eases off in the rather cerebral ending. And there are several enigmatic elements in the book.

Fifty-two-year old Professor David Lurie teaches the Romantic Poets at the Technical University in Cape Town. He has bedded many women in his time, and now he seduces Melanie Isaacs, one of his students. She is strangely passive in the affaire and one wonders why she ever let herself be seduced. When the story comes out, Lurie is called before a committee of enquiry. Some of its members lean over backwards to avoid dismissing him if he will give an explanation and an expression of regret; but he refuses to do more than accept what he has done, refuses to apologize for obeying his sexual urges, and so has to resign.

Disgraced, he goes to the Eastern Cape, intending to stay for a short time with his daughter Lucy, perhaps the only person whom he really loves. She runs a smallholding in a rural area, and is helped by Petrus, who is in the process of acquiring the part of her land on which he works. Lurie has not seen his daughter for about a year, and now the balance of the relationship between them is reversed. He helps a bit with her and with Petrus, and fits in with her Spartan life-style.

And then three local men turn up and,in a terrifying chapter, rape Lucy; Lurie is unable to help her and is nearly killed himself. Coetzee does not need to state specifically that the assailants were black; and it is actually quite a way into the book before we realize that Petrus, too, is black, and that the whole story is set in post-apartheid South Africa and that there are racial tensions in the area.

Does Lucy feel disgraced by what has happened to her? Does she seek to have her assailants prosecuted? Though clearly distressed, she seems as passive about what has happened as Melanie had been, though in her case we come to understand her reasons; less so perhaps why she turns down her father's urging that she should leave the area where she is so exposed to further attacks. He certainly cannot understand her, and his lack of understanding makes him feel old: "no country, this, for old men" - not for old men who do not understand the changing times, not for old men who do not understand their children, any more than it is for old men who lust after young women.

Two other themes run through the book. One is about dogs who feature heavily in the story: guard dogs; stray dogs whom nobody wants; dogs who are killed by the assailants; dogs who are brought to an animal welfare centre to be treated or, if past treatment, to be put down. Lurie helps the woman who runs the welfare centre, and takes the corpses of the dead dogs to the incinerator. Throughout the book he feels compassion for animals and sees parallels between them and humans.

The other theme, which for me has a certain longueur, is Lurie's involvement with Byron. He had taught Byron to his (understandably bored) students: his lectures focus on the analysis of words, and seem to convey little of the romantic spirit. In his relationships he is after all the most unromantic of men. What he has in common with Byron are sexual urges and that he tires of his conquests soon after he has made them. He tries to compose an opera about Byron, but he can make no headway with it until near the end: then he makes the dead Byron a ghost, and he scores the musical accompaniment not for the rich chords of the piano, but for the dry and "silly" plink-plonk of a banjo: not erotic, not elegiac, but comic. Every part of Coetzee's book is carefully thought out, and the symbolism of the passages on Byron is no doubt wider and deeper than I could understand.

A worthy winner of the 1999 Booker Prize.

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