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In arranging for David Laurie and Melanie Isaacs to have sex, J.M. Coetzee produces the embryo of his stark and gripping yarn. It develops, like a good analysis, by unexpected twists and turns, many of them painful. As readers, we accompany Professor Laurie as he stumbles, tumbles and falls into the swirling currents and eddies of present-day South Africa. Eventually he surfaces, stranded, broke and defaced (literally) and gives up hope of completing his last remaining project: an opera about Byron and unrequited love. He is now prepared to settle for something infinitely more modest: ‘That somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will - like a bird - dart up a single authentic note of immortal longing’.
Coetzee's plot has the protagonist, a scholar of Wordsworth and one-time professor of English literature, being sacked in disgrace. This is just the beginning of his journey into and through hell until he eventually reaches a kind of salvation. When Laurie retreats from his university town seeking at least temporary sanctuary with his daughter Lucy on her country smallholding, he is not at all prepared for his agonizing helplessness and humiliation when his beloved only child is gang-raped. To make matters even worse for him, Lucy and he fall out when she determines to sit out the disgrace of her ensuing pregnancy. He nevertheless feels an obligation to be on standby and rents a basic room in the nearby village to sleep in while he bases himself at the bare clinic run by Bev Shaw. Here he chooses to slave away unpaid for seven days a week assisting Bev to treat and put down unwanted dogs and other animals. Finally he sacrifices the only being (a lame dog, also representing himself) with which he has the most meaningful, remaining mutual attachment.
For the unalienated reader, Coetzee's message may seem to be that there is more, qualitatively more, to discovering meaning in the hum an imal condition than being a privileged, clever, elegantly articulate, committe