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Foe reminds me more of Robert Coover's multilayered, metafictional Spanking the Maid than of Robinson Crusoe. That book was about spanking, and this book is about getting ravished. But what's it really about, you ask, and I'm like ugh, isn't "multilayered and metafictional" enough? Fine, god. I'll mark serious spoilers but we'll discuss general plot points, so heads up.

On the first layer: Susan Barton is marooned on an island already inhabited by two other castaways. When she is rescued, she tries to sell her story. There are mysteries: one of the other castaways is mute. Supposedly his tongue was cut out, but she fails to verify this. Who cut out his tongue? Or did anyone? And who is the woman who shows up claiming to be her long-lost daughter?

Below that, it's about Daniel Defoe's 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe: the other two castaways are Cruso [sic] and Friday. The author she attempts to sell her story to is Foe [sic] himself. So this is metafiction, and here's another mystery: why didn't Barton herself make it into Foe's novel?

And below that, it's about the process of storytelling: whose stories are heard and whose are silenced and which truth gets told. Coetzee pretends that [De]foe wrote his books from life, but changed them to make them more entertaining. The version he eventually published has virtually nothing to do with its inspiration.

(Several of Defoe's other characters also show up here to help make the point. And it's true, actually, although not in the way Coetzee presents it: Defoe was inspired by the story of castaway )

Coetzee is South African, and he wrote Foe in the 80s, at the height of the controversy over a soon-to-die apartheid. When he presents Friday as mysteriously mute - the only character unable to tell his own story - he's talking about his country. He that "South African literature is a literature in bondage. It is a less than fully human literature." That's what Friday represents, this less than fully human literature.

So the third level answers the questions of the first two. (view spoiler)[Friday is mute because the storyteller has muted him. And Barton isn't really a character: she's the Muse. She tells you so herself, during an explicit sex scene. (All that ravishing represents the process of creation - sorry, I know that's cliched, blame Coetzee. Barton begins the story moments after being gang-raped by mutineers, so there's a metaphor for you.) And the mystery daughter is the story itself - unrecognizable to the Muse by the time it arrives, twisted and yet presented hopefully by the storyteller. "Did I get it right?" And the Muse is like ugh, no, that's terrible. (hide spoiler)]

Honestly, I think the book descends a little into wankery starting around Part III, 3/4 of the way through the book. It stops creating story and starts talking about it, and it's a bit on the tedious side. But it's done enough by that point to earn a little wanking; it's a very good book. Multilayered! And metafictional.