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The whole story rotates around the rapes of two women: David Lurie's rape of Melanie and his daughter, Lucy's, rape at the hands of three criminals who invade her home and attack her. Yet, there are few moments where women discuss their own rapes - Lucy refuses to do so, given only a few lines of dialogue to describe what happened to her and how it is she feels; Melanie's testimony silenced, due to David Lurie's decision not to read her statement. I understand the creation of a character like David Lurie and the reasons he would choose not to read such a statement or to avoid acknowledging his own complicity in such behaviour - I also acknowledge Coetzee's attempts to rectify such culpability with Lucy's dialogue "Maybe, for men, hating the woman makes sex more exciting. You are a man, you ought to know" - Here the reader and David Lurie himself are made painfully aware of his own complicity in committing the same atrocity against another human being. But Melanie's story is never heard, her words are never given the same respect as David's, or as Lucy's, which holds both gendered and racial weight within this story. In fact, the rape of Lucy becomes more of a political metaphor for post-Apartheid politics : "a history of wrong. Think of it that way, if it helps. It may have seemed personal but it wasn't. It came down from the ancestors. Women's experiences and voices, here, become metaphors for the redistribution of land and property in the wake of the apartheid ere, with Lucy's rape aligned with Petrus' desire to take her land. In the end, it is Petrus' complicity in the rape, Lucy's pregnancy, that allow him to take control of her, to demand that she "marry" him and hand over her land, in return for his "protection." Lucy becomes isolated, within the domestic sphere, and Coetzee does nothing to rectify this, to question this, to philosophise on what this means.

In fact, throughout the story Coetzee's descriptions of women, through David Lurie's eyes, leave little to be desired. He describes his daughter's breasts and buttocks as "ample," he describes Bev as a woman who "make[s] little effort to look attractive," and despite the fact that this is an element of David Lurie's character, there is little to redeem Coetzee's presentation of women. David Lurie's epiphany at the end of the novel is to reassert his own use of the word "enrinched," to reinforce the idea that the women in his life have enriched him. He says nothing of their pleasures, their desires, their humanity, it is their impact upon his life that is important to David, they have enriched him "even the least of him, even the failures," even plain women like Bev have had an impact on his life, regardless of their own humanity.

The problem with this representation, isn't the characterisation of the abhorrent David Lurie but the complicity of Coetzee in this attitude. Lucy tells her father that she is not a "minor" character within his life, he is not the major player and she simply a character in his story, she has her own life, desires, thoughts, feelings. Yet, Coetzee doesn't let us see these, he characterises Lucy as just this, a secondary player in David Lurie's story, and moreso, in the story of South Africa. Her body, and the body of the silenced Melanie, become terrain over which men battle - David and Petrus battle over his daughter's body, while she fights to retain control but doesn't ever really manage it. Coetzee returns to the trope of "virgin" terrain - emphasising this through Lucy's sexual orientation "no wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow." Here, Lucy's sexuality becomes a modern interpretation of "virgin" soil. SHe is a lesbian, untouched by men, has "no need of men," but has been trespassed upon - these men have taken her territory, she has become the virgin soil of colonialist tropes - her body representative of the land that Petrus, and the other Black South Africans in the post-apartheid world - want to take ownership over, want to dominate.

Coetzee doesn't rectify this idea. He uses women's body to create an image of South African in the post-apartheid setting; he returns to the "virgin soil" trope and reminds his readers that women's bodies, objects, clothing, land, are all property to be taken, to be damaged, to be dominated by the men of the world. He uses David's rape of Melanie to mirror Lucy's rape, to draw attention to the racial differences and similarities, that both Lucy's rapists and David are attempting to dominate women's bodies, to dominate the land. Yet he doesn't give women voices; the women are silenced by the men's attempts and domination and, in the end, men speak for both Lucy and Melanie and Coetzee himself takes no efforts to free them from this bond.

The conclusion to this critique could easily be summed up through Coetzee's own words, that come through David when he is contemplating his daughter's rape, "he can, if he concentrates, if he loses himself, be the men, inhabit them, fill them with the ghost of himself. The question is, does he have it in him to be the woman?" David doesn't wonder if he can put himself in his daughter's place, empathise with her feelings as a victim, he asks if he can be the woman, if he can put himself in the shoes of a woman and understand her experiences, as a general contemplation. He can imagine being a rapist, a violent one at that, but he can't imagine being violated, being the victim, being a woman, in general - in all that being a woman represents. I would argue, that this line sums up Coetzee's own position within this novel. He can describe a rapist, he can understand a rape, he can present the internal monologue of a man both raping and dealing with the rape of someone he loves, but he can't, he doesn't have it in him, to be the woman. It is enlightening that David eventually is able to write as a woman, through his Opera, which develops through the voice of Theresa, Byron's lover, but Coetzee himself fails to do this - he doesn't ever give Melanie a voice, or Lucy enough of one. He remains unable to "be the woman," to see his story through another's eyes. Instead, it is through his, Coetzee, the white South African's eyes, we see this story and we see this battle. His terrain and his story is the body of women, but women are merely that, terrain, land, property, voiceless and dominated, and the whole thing left a bitter taste in my mouth.