The insubstantial life

Michael was born slightly disfigured. His mother, poor, single, looked at him as a burden, with his unlovely face and slow mind. Unwanted and unloved, he spent his childhood in a special institution, Huis Norenius. Most of us remember childhood fondly, suppressing the many cruelties that accompany innocence with the magic wand of selective memory. Michael is bereft even of that imagination, and Huis Norenius hangs on his head like a cloud that keeps on growing but never bursts. Derision of others, real and imagined, sits on him tightly, and he lives alone without friends or any companion.

In the thirty first year of his unobserved, unreflected life as a Gardener Grade B in Cape Town municipality, he discovers his sick mother, and with her, the meaning of his life.

"The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother."

Michael resolves to fulfill her stated desire to leave the city to go back to her native village by building a makeshift barrow for her when they don't get a permit to leave the city. At that point, one may sense the onset of a new, redemptive, journey for the unfortunate man. Reader's hopes are to be belied of course. JM Coetzee does not provide easy journeys or easy answers to the mess of modern life. Particularly one that takes place in a war-torn, race-torn, country.

Quite charactertistically, his mother dies on the way cutting his life's meaning in the middle, and Michael's lonely journey takes unexpected turns subsequently. There is no great action that ever happens in his life, and his physical condition gets worse with struggle and malnutrition. There is complete absence of any romantic interest, and one charitable sexual encounter. Once, while locked in a camp of unemployed refugees, Michale is struck by a woman, who had lost her new-born recemtly. Michael feels compelled to wait and watch as she comes out of her room every evening, silent, tearless. He feels he may be falling in love finally. But then, one day, the woman, who remains unnamed, grows out of her meloncholia and merges with the crowd. Michael never notices her again. Coetzee describes life like this. As it unfolds pitilessly in a humdrum, but still unique way.

You are also struck by the pictures he draws of loneliness. Intense, deeply evocative, they remind you of Dosteyvsky and his embitterd, lonely, men. Men carrying deep grievances in their hearts, and running away from people. Men watching life pass by, without entering into it, without engaging with it. But the greatness in Coetzee is that he also makes one realize that, in a deeply rooted way, these are also the men who recognize, most acutely, the futility of struggle and existence.

The nature of Michael's rebellion also dawns slowly to you. He leads an insubstantial life, yes, but this inarticulate man also stands outside the ravages of history, refusing to join a camp, refusing to become a slave. He is attached elementally to very few things - his mother who refuses to leave his mind, a small farm he creates in wilderness. When he had to leave that "patch of earth", he felt that a "cord of tenderness" was being cut. Very affectingly, "it seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again."

The exterior world is always like a shadow to Michael. As Robert, one of his camp mates, who was growing closer to him, comments, "I have never seen a man so asleep". And Michael instantly recognizes the truth in that. It is solely his interior life that feeds him and also cuts him. Even when his physical self dwindles to a skeletal figure with sustained malnutrition, there is still life in him that thrives and seeks to be free.

"Life & Times of Michael K" is a luminous novel, even if not Coetzee's best, that raises important questions on the notion of social progress and individual rebellion, of the supposedly irresistable march of history, and what it does to the people sitting at the margins. I have read only three novels of JM Coetzee, but can perhaps say this for him more than any other writer that reading him makes living worthwhile.