“If one truly wants to be a better person,” says a character in JM Coetzee’s new book, “there must be less roundabout ways of getting there than by darkening thousands of pages with prose.” It’s a typical piece of self-deprecating wit from the author who published an entire novel mocking himself (Summertime, 2009), whose Jesus trilogy (2013–2019) had a sequence of comic dialogue about poo, and yet who retains a reputation as humourless.
It’s true that Coetzee, a serious writer for half a century, was not just serious but sombre in early work such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K (1983). But his later work is lighter in tone, with a clarity that expresses ideas without making the story a mere vehicle for those ideas. His latest book contains a new novella, The Pole, that confirms Coetzee as one of the great writers of fiction in English, along with five stories from the past 20 years.
The Pole of the title is a 72-year-old concert pianist, famous for his Chopin interpretations, who’s invited by a cultural board in Barcelona to play for them. His name is Witold, but his surname “has so many w’s and z’s in it that no one on the board even tries to pronounce it”. The story comes through the eyes of fortysomething Beatriz, who’s tasked with glad-handing him.
She is intimidated by meeting him, but he turns out to be playful when he emails later, signing himself, “Your friend Witold with the difficult name”. It also turns out he is a typical man, with designs on Beatriz beyond the artistic. “I am here for you,” he writes, alarmingly. “I do not forget you.” Beatriz is baffled: the message seems to come from another world. “What does it say about her that the man expects she will respond?” Later, when he writes poems about her, she wonders: who is this other Beatriz he has created?
There are enough surprises in The Pole – a journey across Europe, mysterious box, missing neighbour – to make further digging into the plot feel like bad sport, but the story is just the tip of the pleasure. In another author’s hands, the scenario – a powerful man propositioning a younger woman – would be the springboard for a clearcut morality tale. Coetzee, however, does not like to tell us what to think; he prefers to provoke thought. He uses Beatriz’s internal monologue to tug gently at an idea, dislodging it for the reader to pick up. This makes Coetzee’s books a more active reading experience than almost any other writer I know. The greatest tension in the book is internal, between the reader’s desire to reflect on what has come and the need to know what happens next.
But The Pole is also about writing fiction, and about Coetzee himself. It opens with the author contemplating his characters: “The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.” The woman and the man – Beatriz and Witold – squirm away when he tries to nail them down, the process of writing a sort of alchemy. “Barely has the Pole emerged into the light than he begins to change.”
The writer is unable to keep himself off the page. When Beatriz reflects that Witold’s Chopin is “so dry, so matter-of-fact!”, we think of Coetzee’s dry style and his fear, expressed in Summertime, that his writing is “too cool, too neat”. For Witold, with his uneven English (“Is he saying something profound or is he simply hitting the wrong words, like a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter?”), music is how he communicates; so consider the tragedy of the musician, or writer, whose work is not understood. Coetzee knows about that, too – he responded to criticism of The Childhood of Jesus by opening its sequel with a self-mocking epigraph from Don Quixote: “Some say second parts are never as good.”
The execution of story and ideas in The Pole is so exquisite that it comes almost as a relief – he’s human, after all! – when the other stories fall short. Four of them continue the life of Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous writer in Coetzee’s 2003 novel. That book was as much a collection of essays as a novel, and so are these, wrangling with the purpose of art in dialogues with Elizabeth’s son and daughter.
When Elizabeth rejects the idea that beauty makes us better people, her daughter’s response feels like a repudiation of Coetzee’s self-deprecation, a rare and touching acknowledgment of his worth. “What you have produced as a writer not only has a beauty of its own – […] shapeliness, clarity, economy – but has also changed the lives of others, made them better human beings. […] Not because what you write contains lessons but because it is a lesson.”
Coetzee has been giving us lessons in beauty – a certain kind of beauty – for decades; and, at his best, he writes so well you wonder why other people bother. Well, someone needs to take over eventually. But The Pole shows that, at 83 years old, there is no diminishing of his talents. Long may he darken our pages with prose.
The Pole and Other Stories by JM Coetzee is published by Harvill Secker (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
