JM Coetzee is a consistently self-effacing writer, Joyceanly present everywhere in his work yet nowhere visible. All the same, he has a recurring alter ego through whom he speaks when he is at his most passionate. It is typical of this author that he should choose for his spokesperson – although that is far too strong a word – a woman. When we first met her, in 1990’s Age of Iron, she was called Elizabeth Curren, and, again typically, she was dying. That novel remains one of Coetzee’s finest achievements.
In The Lives of Animals (1999), a pair of lectures delivered in fictional form, Elizabeth Curren has become the ageing novelist Elizabeth Costello, who is much concerned with the “enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing” of animals, which to her “rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of”. The abuse of non-human animals is a constantly recurring theme in Coetzee’s work, one that obviously causes him as much anguish and outrage as it does his fictional avatar.
