 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Slow Man
By J.M. Coetzee
Knopf $45.00
One of the year's 'big' books, despite relative slimness and not being even long-listed for the Booker Prize (which the author has won twice, plus the Nobel Prize for Literature), this enigmatically titled novel contains more than a touch of the real Coetzee in his main character, Paul Rayment, a man in his late 60s who lives a reclusive, even puritan existence in Adelaide after years abroad - France in Rayment's case, South Africa in Coetzee's.
When we first meet Rayment he is in hospital after being knocked off his pushbike by a speeding motorist. The doctor informs him that his leg must be amputated, the only question being how much might be saved.
'As if it knows it is being spoken of, as if these terrible words have roused it from its troubled sleep, the right leg sends him a shaft of jagged white pain...'
'Right,' says the young man, and pats him lightly on the cheek. 'Time to get moving.'
Later he is visited by Wayne Blight, the teenaged driver of the car that clipped him, who speaks of 'Real bad luck', offers an apology but accepts no blame.
'Not an artist in words, young Wayne; yet his every utterance is carefully evasive, as though he has been told the room is bugged,' thinks Rayment, sourly.
Recuperating but staunchly refusing a prosthesis, Rayment engages a home nurse named Marijana (that's without a 'u'), an art restorer back in Croatia before migrating to Australia with her husband and children, the oldest being the handsome Drago.
There being no fool like an old one, Rayment soon falls in love - or imagines so - with Marijana and attempts to win her affection by offering to fund Drago to attend a costly boarding school and settle things with a jeweller who has caught her daughter shoplifting.
Into this intriguing plot walks the mysterious Elizabeth Costello, an author of Rayment's age who bears the same name as the title character of an earlier Coetzee novel.
Challenging the solitary Rayment's attitudes, she moves into his flat and tries to steer him through his obsession with the married nurse, even offering to share with him a comfortable late-life companionship.
'If I had to elect between good nursing and a pair of loving hands, I would elect the loving hands any day,' she says.
'Well, I do not have loving hands, Elizabeth.'
'No, you do not. Neither loving hands nor a loving heart,' she replies. 'A heart in hiding is what I call it. How are we going to bring your heart out of hiding? - that is the question.'
Alas, it is not one that either can answer.
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