Slow lives overtaken by time

Fiction: In the space of a second, a life can be altered forever, as Paul Rayment discovers in Slow Man. This is an astounding book about an ageing man in Adelaide who loses his leg in a road accident, and who finally finds himself, or more importantly, belatedly discovers a not totally selfish response to other people, albeit a response shaped by need.

It sounds straightforward, an almost dangerously simplistic modern fable, yet it isn't. The 2003 Nobel literature laureate, JM Coetzee, one of the finest writers in the world, a natural philosopher and literary hunger artist who writes inspired narratives about the ordeal of being alive, has again explored the soul and arrived at the state of terror known as reality. Rayment is in turn bitter, funny, vulnerable, desperate and defiantly human. It is a personal book, because it is deeply, remorselessly human.

In the opening sequence, Rayment experiences the exquisite sensation of absolute pain. "He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning.

"The sun's touch is kind. There are worse things than letting oneself go slack, waiting for one's strength to return. In fact there might be worse things than having a quick nap. He closes his eyes; the world tilts beneath him, rotates; he goes absent." All too soon, though, Rayment returns to his new reality, a place in which his former self-contained independence is no longer possible. He has become helpless.

"He awakes in a cocoon of dead air. He tries to sit up but cannot: it is as if he were encased in concrete." The facts begin to emerge. Knocked off his bike by a passing car, Rayment's gradual understanding of his situation alerts him to the hospital bed he is lying in, and the discovery he is about to have his leg amputated. "It is not one of those situations where we have a choice," says the young doctor. "Do you understand that? Do I have your consent?" Rayment's response is described with austere grace by Coetzee: "He hears his own gasp, and then the thudding of blood in his ears." Then there is the moment when he realises: "In a younger person they might perhaps have gone for a reconstruction, but a reconstruction of the required order would entail a whole series of operations . . . considering his age, it was thought best to take the leg off clean above the knee." Rayment has entered a phase of life in which suddenly there are no longer options.

Equally he must acknowledge that he has no family; his sister is dead, as are his parents. Once there was a wife, but: "She has escaped him, wholly escaped. How she managed the trick he has yet to grasp, but it is so: she has escaped into a life of her own." This story of everyday personal tragedy is described with unnerving clarity and detached exactness. Coetzee evokes the unrelenting turmoil of a lost soul through the genius of his always remarkable, invariably beautiful prose. "The nights are endless. He is too hot, he is too cold; the leg, closed in its swaddling, itches and cannot be reached. If he holds his breath he can hear the ghostly creeping of his assaulted flesh as it tries to knit itself together again." Rayment's plight is described with remote sympathy. Once he settles into it though, rising levels of black humour emerge. A woman friend arrives at the hospital to commiserate. " 'I hope you are going to sue' she says. 'I have no intention of suing,' he replies. 'Too many openings for comedy. I want my leg back, failing which . . . ' "

The sharpness of tone that creeps into Rayment's voice with this exchange increases with the arrival of a social worker, "Mrs Potts or Putz." It is she who informs him of his new requirements - specialised nursing at home.

The arrival of the first home nurse allows Coetzee further comedy. Slow Man is yet another major turning point in the career of the first writer to win the Booker Prize twice, and both times with magnificent novels.

OF COETZEE'S NINE previous novels, eight rank among the supreme achievements of contemporary fiction. It was Coetzee who chronicled the horrors of life in apartheid South Africa with early works such as In The Heart of the Country (1977) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), while remaining true to his instincts as an artist. His vision was never swamped by polemic. From the publication of his fourth novel, Life & Times of Michael K (1983), a parable about a gardener in pursuit of freedom, which won Coetzee his first Booker and made him internationally famous, to the masterful Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), a study of personal loss based on the life of Dostoyevsky, to the ferocious honesty of Disgrace (1999), his eighth novel and second Booker winner, he has tested the novel form as art and as a medium for truths.

Few writers have used ambiguity and metaphor with such subtle instinct. Unlike Gordimer and Brink, Coetzee always retained the aloofness of the artist by appearing to concentrate on the personal. Ironically, with the collapse of apartheid, Coetzee, long revered in his native South Africa, lost the favour of the ANC through his truthful depiction of post-apartheid South Africa in Disgrace - and left the country. Like a rejected prophet, the wounded Coetzee moved to Australia. The Nobel Prize followed. It was received with minimal fuss in South Africa.

Shortly before that, however, Coetzee published Elizabeth Costello, his only disappointing work to date. It tells the story of an Australian writer, famous for a book she wrote years earlier. She has become an icon famous for being famous. Dominated by a complex series of abstract issues, this strange, disjointed novel certainly creates the sense of dislocation Coetzee was aiming at and it confronts the point at which morality, pragmatism and sentimentality converge. His thesis was the role of the artist under fire.

The narrative was closely aligned with Coetzee's provocative fable, The Lives of Animals (1999), which was based on the Tanner lectures he delivered at Princeton. Featured in those sequences was Elizabeth Costello. Within the format of the lecture, Costello, who is presented as obsessed with man's cruelty to animals, is allowed to elaborate and then be challenged in turn by four scholars. In the non-fiction work, the device succeeds rather more convincingly than it does in the novel. Coetzee has often mixed fiction and non-fiction, myth and polemic. Waiting for the Barbarians is an extraordinary performance which leaves the reader feeling privy to a nightmare that may or may not have taken place in the mind of the central character. Elizabeth Costello the novel evolved in a study of an individual in chaos having realised that a life lived through books and words has resulted merely in having assembled an assortment of opinions, impressions and ideas, but no comfort.

Still, it amounted to a daring failure, but some readers may not be overwhelmed with joy when the same Elizabeth Costello, still old, still strident, moves into Paul Rayment's troubled new life in which he is at the mercy of his feeling for an efficient new nurse, a middle-aged married woman from Croatia.

WHY HAS COETZEE allowed a character from one book to walk into another? Is it an act of defiance aimed at criticism of Elizabeth Costello the novel? Or has her function a deeper relevance? It does.

Desperate to win the affections of his nurse, the previously detached Rayment is reduced to wooing Marijuana, the nurse, through her children. It is funny and touching. But Costello overlooks it all. At once an irritating court jester who has arrived from nowhere, and a subversively jocular truth-teller, she is an example of how daring Coetzee is.

Rayment's bewildered dislike soars. At one point Costello, having become an articulate bag lady, addresses the nurse's wayward son who has moved into Rayment's grim flat:

So there we are. We are all unhappy, it seems. You are unhappy, Drago,because the ructions at home have forced you to pitch your tent on Victoria Square among the winos. Your mother [the nurse] is unhappy because she must take shelter among relatives who disapprove of her. Your father is unhappy because he thinks people are laughing at him. Paul here is unhappy because unhappiness is second nature to him but more particularly because he has not the faintest idea of how to bring about his heart's desire. And I am unhappy because nothing is happening. Four people in four corners, moping, like tramps in Beckett, and myself in the middle, wasting time, being wasted by time.

Later in the narrative Paul takes up this theme of time when he says to the nurse's son, "I have been overtaken by time, by history. There is nothing strange in that - in being overtaken by time. It will happen to you too, if you live long enough." Rarely has Coetzee concentrated so directly on characterisation as he has here. The portrait of the Croation family is exceptionally well handled.

In Age of Iron, Elizabeth Curran, who on returning home the day she is informed she is dying of cancer, discovers a tramp bedded down in her driveway, and watches the death of the old South Africa through the metaphor of the tramp. In Slow Man, funny and sad, Coetzee uses the loss of a limb and the awareness of mortality as a way of looking at a man desperate to live before his life is over.

Longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, it is academic to ponder if this master can win for a third time. It is irrelevant. The essential fact is no one writes as well, and thinks as deeply, as Coetzee. His responses startle. Only John Banville approaches Coetzee's profound examination of how story and art, language and thought pursue the ultimate truths and terrors.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Slow Man By JM Coetzee, Secker, 263pp. £15.99