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It's not hard to see what drew Coetzee to the Cruso myth. Stranded on an austere patch of land with only a black servant to keep you company: reminds me an awful lot of the author's native South Africa. The long first section of the book, in which Susan Barton washes ashore on Cruso's island, is a tour-de-force, one of the best sustained pieces of writing Coetzee's ever done. But the shift to England, where Susan enlists Daniel Defoe to write her story, comes along with endless ruminations on the interplay between between fact and fiction--questions over who is truly birthing the story and, god help us, the role of the muse--and the thing gets rather tiresome. Coetzee has this in common with Italo Calvino: he's an elegant, world-class writer who nonetheless could get diverted by meta-fictional games that, I'm sorry, are a little beneath him.

Meanwhile, the author's refusal to resolve intriguing questions he's set up--such as the true identity of a girl who claims to be Susan's long-lost daughter--strikes me as needlessly tight-assed. I'm all for subtlety, but this book keeps too many secrets to itself. The way Susan leads the girl into a forest and leaves her there could have had the uncanny force of a Hawthorne story (think of something like "Roger Malvin's Burial"); instead, it simply seems unfinished.

Still, the settings are beautifully wrought, and in Friday's plight Coetzee shows us how slavery scrapes hollow not only the slave but the master: late in the book, Susan tries to put Friday back on a boat to Africa, but there is nowhere for him to go--his Africa is long gone. This is a noble failure of a book if ever there was one.

For those interested in cover art: the cover painting is by John Collier, whose art appears on all the Penguin editions of Coetzee's books, and is a haunting piece of work.