It is 16 years since South African writer J.M. Coetzee won the 1983 Booker Prize with the beautiful and profound parable, Life and Times of Michael K. Many agree that it remains one of the finest to have won in the often contentious prize's 31-year history.
Last night Coetzee was declared the winner of the 1999 Booker Prize for Disgrace, a superb and strange narrative. In doing so he becomes the first writer to win it twice. Coetzee's deserved victory not only confirms his status as one of the handful of truly great living writers, it also justifies the Booker itself. Most critics agree Disgrace is not only an outstanding novel in an artistic sense; it is also a daring and angry work shaped by Coetzee's characteristically elegant and savage grace. It is the story of David Lurie, a twice-divorced Cape Town university professor and career womaniser who is planning to write a book about Byron. Lurie is a self-contained character, "intense . . . never passionate" and not particularly likeable. At best an anxious shadow as a father, he is cold, selfish, incapable of living as a companion and is suited only to living on his own. "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well." His solution is having an arrangement with a pleasing prostitute, described as an "exotic".
All is well in his self-absorbed world until the day he unexpectedly happens upon her as she is out shopping with her two small sons. The chance sighting breaks what was really a false sense of intimacy. Determined to protect her real life, she sees him only as a client before ending the arrangement.
Disgrace is a study of one man's lonely journey to self-knowledge as well as a belated understanding of the rights and dignity of others. He is highly intelligent, a scholar and a thinker, but as a man he is also increasingly vulnerable and aware he is getting older. ". . . he could always count on his magnetism. If he looked at a woman in a certain way, with a certain interest, she would return his look, he could rely on that. That was how he lived; for years, for decades. Then one day it all ended. Without warning his powers fled."
Always the most politically detached of the major South African writers, Coetzee with his subtle sense of outrage has consistently explored the business of being human and what it entails, while also remaining alert to the society in which he lives. Lurie's fall occurs when he forces his attentions on a young woman student, who though initially complicit, soon retreats into a disengaged curiosity.
He is disgraced and retreats to his daughter's home in the country, where he finally discovers himself and experiences violation and humiliation.
That a Booker panel was astute enough to see the greatness in this novel and shortlist it is a considerable achievement; that it had the wisdom to select it as the winner proves fiction is important and at its best, as in Disgrace, can be true to life and art. The best book won.