Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel
by J. M. Coetzee
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Book Summary Information
Author: J. M. CoetzeeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1985-01-08
ISBN: 0140074481
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel
Book Review: Is There Joy in Utter Destitution?
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was thirteen, we moved out to a smallholding on the outskirts of Johannesburg. We still refer to it as "The Farm", but only about a third of the land was arable, the rest was slate, covered with a thin crust of dust and scrub. There was a borehole and an orchard, a vegetable patch, chickens, three horses, two donkeys, a cow, and two pigs. There was also a family of nine - Wilson and Rebecca M. and their seven children - living in two small rooms behind the three garages that sheltered our Japanese sedans from the harsh African sun.
Within a month, my parents had arranged to build two extra prefab rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, and had ensured that all the children could attend the little mission school behind the quarry. The warm winds swiftly spread word of this charitable new family and soon people from surrounding farms came limping in with sick and injured relatives in need of medical attention. Clothes, food, transport and advice were also liberally dispensed.
Let me stop there, because this is not intended as an ode to my parents' compassion, but rather as a counterpoint to Coetzee's vivid examination of the contention that there is freedom and even joy to be found in utter destitution. The author tempts the reader to ask himself: Do those who want or need next to nothing become irrelevant and therefore exempt from subjugation? Although it is risky to assign intent to the work of any author, this is the burning question I have taken from The Life and Times of Michael K - a book about a man who turns his back on an emaciated urban existence and seeks to return to the soil of his ancestors, carrying his dying mother on this back.
On his way, Michael encounters numerous obstacles in a war-torn country - roadblocks, robbers and a detention camp, where one of the inmates has a truly novel perspective on the sinister motives underlying the charity of a regime that cares for its poorest by incarcerating them:
"After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soup. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. The prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we just grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good." (p. 88)
Food for thought, in more ways than one. To what extent is our own sense of charity fuelled by such selfish motives? Who hasn't turned the sick and dying into paper and ash by simply switching channels on the remote? But Coetzee refuses to tread such beaten tracks. Instead, he takes the reader down the road less rutted. Michael escapes from the detention camp and makes his way out into the boondocks to the abandoned farm where his mother grew up. Here he finds a sense of place that lies somewhere between Freedom and Oblivion, digging a hovel for himself and living off the land, his sole purpose in life being the cultivation of pumpkins. This bucolic idyll is disturbed by a band of rebels, seeking to replenish their water supply at the farm, and later by a company of soldiers who capture and incarcerate Michael, because they suspect he is in cahoots with the guerrillas.
Later, we find Michael in a rehabilitation centre, where he becomes the object of fascination of the doctor who is in charge of guiding him back into society. The second part of the book consists of the doctor's observations and musings, which again bear testimony to Coetzee's ability to distil crystal-clear metaphors from murky realities, letting his characters do the thinking and talking:
"He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature. I cannot really think of him as a man, though he is older than me by most reckonings." (p. 135)
All of which brings my back to The Farm, where Rebecca, Wilson and their children were tossed randomly from hand to hand like pebbles. Driven by curiosity rather than compassion, I went back to take a look several years after my parents had returned to the suburbs and I had emigrated to Holland. After negotiating passage with the farm's new owner, I found Rebecca in her room behind the garages. She embraced me warmly and then gave me a bleak update on the rest of the family - the dead, the dying, the incarcerated, the subjugated - pebbles reduced to dust by poverty's sledgehammer, a brilliant system of disenfranchisement that constantly reinforced the belief that some are destined to spend their lives as members of an underclass, a caste who could or should have no higher ambition than to seek joy in utter destitution.
And so Coetzee has led me down the path less-rutted, causing me to reassess my own memories, ideas, morals and motives. Yes, the author and I share a South African background, but I am convinced that any reader will find a great deal to ponder, enjoy and recognise in The Life and Times of Michael K.
Tomorrow, when I re-read this review, I will undoubtedly find much to be at fault or at best imprecisely surmised or argued. But perhaps that is greatest strength of Coetzee's work: it cannot be pinned down and made to reveal its intentions, but continues to provoke new questions and interpretations by remaining always open to new perspectives.
Summary of Life and Times of Michael K: A Novel
In a South Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience?the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.
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