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Some novelists can work comic relief into the most heart-wrenching dramas. See Kazuo Ishiguro, Edmund White, James McBride to mention a few. The light moments help provide greater contrast when things turn black. William Shakespeare knew that well. But Coetzee is absolutely dead humorless. That said, this is a story that should resonate well in our #metoo era. Our narrator, a twice divorced middle-aged man, a Cape Town professor, bangs one of his students who then files a complaint with the college. I knew a professor like this; but a blind eye was turned to such matters then. It’s hard now to believe such a time ever existed, but it did. One wonders what the upshot will be long term? Will we live in this constant din of accusation, or will the hounds eventually be dissuaded by rule of law? Please read Sigrid Nunez’s fabulous novel The Friend for more on how our culture has been warped by #metoo. She cites this particular Coetzee novel a number of times.

“After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that’s that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one’s life. Serve one’s time�� (p. 67) says the 52-year-old narrator. When called on the carpet by colleagues he refuses to make any written expression of remorse, and he refuses “counseling,�� which he likens to Maoist re-education. He leaves Cape Town and drives into the countryside to visit his daughter on her farm. Soon they are brutalized by black men. The daughter is raped. So how does what the professor did differ from what his assailants did? The question hangs in the air. The apartheid legacy is plumbed. The daughter, who refuses to leave her farm, says “What if that [rape] is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it ; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as a debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves.�� (p. 158)

There’s so much here I haven’t addressed. Like the narrator’s work in a local animal shelter, or his apology to the parents of the student he’s seduced, or his conversations with his deeply bitter ex-wife, Lucy’s mother, or the return to Lucy’s farm of one of her rapists. . . . The characters are flawed: angry, beneficent, cruel, complaisant. These attributes are like serrations on a knife that give the story purchase in one’s mind. I will re-read this one. I don’t think I could forget it if I tried.