Summertime and the living’s easy

At this stage in his literary career J.M. Coetzee’s reputation precedes any of his new releases, and for this reason, it is easy to pass Summertime’s Booker Prize nomination as inevitable. Coetzee’s latest release does however fully merit its inclusion, but the justification for this arrives slowly and surely rather than dramatically.

We learn nothing new from Summertime, which although may strike as criticism, is far from being so – for Coetzee seeks only to reassure us in our inadequacy and offers no silver lining to his tale of pathos. As the interviewer argues in relation to the author “Fire is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of his books”, which whilst indicative of the narrative is only partial in its description of Coetzee’s lethal ability to underwhelm and disrupt.

This disruption owes much to the jumpy narrative used from the outset, which shifts between newspaper accounts, interviews, “un-edited” stubs, even journalistic amendments on its journey towards anti-climax. Even those familiar with the twice-Booker winning author will, it seems, find Summertime as disconcerting as the uninitiated first-timer is likely to. Whilst it stops short of the “split-screen’” simultaneous style of his “Diary of a Bad Year”, the discomfort remains tangible.

This discomfort however, is precisely the object. The novel’s anticipation focuses on the dwindling hopes of a respite and remittance from the embarrassment felt at gazing into this pseudo-auto-biographical account of the writer; yet no such distraction is ever granted. Coetzee’s mastery becomes fully tested in the establishment of the author as both creator and subject, omnipotent in some sense, but undeniably flawed, and irrevocably human in another.

The accounts of John Coetzee, reflect for the most part on the denial of reverence for the ambiguous protagonist – a shadow who was “not a prince but a frog…not human, not fully human”, and yet one who was “not awarded the (Nobel) Prize for nothing”. There seems, albeit fleeting, a sense of hope in the success of a writer, who was not, we are told, a “great man”; and yet such promise is always in the periphery – sidelined into oblivion. In the undermined human guise though, John Coetzee comes to represent to a far wider degree than the simple biography of “Hollywood gossip and secrets of the rich and famous”, so derided by one of the novel’s interviewee’s, could ever hope to achieve.

In any interpretation though, we are shied away from certainty: “It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life”. Coetzee, as both author and fictional character, have the annoying yet irresistible trait it seems, of stranding the reader at precisely the moment when some order of balance becomes feasible.

Even in Summertime’s limited moments of complete biographical insight, the description of the novel as “self-effacing” does little credit to the violence of the sustained self-mutilation which underpins the plot. This cross-examination of character becomes almost wilfully destructive in its search for the purpose of the task to which both Coetzee, the fictional character, and Coetzee the man have dedicated their lives – writing.

We are told that authorship is a “bid for immortality”, yet “no one is immortal”, and with the day of the writer as “oracle” passed in the narrator’s view, the space for purpose and meaning seem apparent only by their absence. The sentiment is all-reaching though and is applicable to us too, as readers: in Summertime we are all “fictioneers”.

Though we are warned away from the temptations of a wholly auto-biographical reading, which frequently leaves the landscape of the novel desolate and wind-picked, it is impossible to view the novel as worthless. Much of the failed quest for identity, for instance, rests on Coetzee and his compatriots finding themselves in the context of a sparring and shattered South Africa: that “beautiful country with many, many problems”, in which the protagonist finds his status as a citizen “legal but illegitimate”.

John Coetzee becomes then “just a man, a man of his time”, and yet in his colleague Sophie’s account he seems “happiest in the role of outsider”. Perhaps this happiness though, if it may so be called, is owed only to forced necessity. Either way, whilst sympathy seems merited, Coetzee’s account is not one of self-pity, or of gratification in sorrow. It is merely a presentation of despondence which gives no answers, but yet which crucially demands none in return.

As Coetzee tells at the novel’s ending, “One or the other: there is no third way”, and yet the wild possibilities of this metaphor look to have fizzled out before any hope of meaning can be found.

Summertime is indeed an appropriate swansong for Coetzee’s tripartite of fictional biography, but it is a climax occurring only within the barren, existential wastelands of his fiction: “Too cool, too neat…Too easy. Too lacking in passion, That’s all”.