“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.
