The Childhood of Jesus
March 2013
J. M. Coetzee / Text Publishing
The equation of two plus two, for those familiar with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, is a potent symbol, for Big Brother’s subjugation of Winston is practically complete when he professes, amongst other things, that ‘TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE’. The Childhood of Jesus has its own ‘two and two’ moments. In an inversion, Simón, the character who accompanies us through this surreal journey, laments, “What kind of crime is it for a child to say that two and two make three?
How is it going to shake the social order?” Whilst Orwell’s dystopic novel was set in an unrecognisable London, J. M. Coetzee’s Novilla is distasteful in the same way the notion of the benevolent dictator is, for it is a dystopian utopia. Refugees who arrive to the city are given refuge, jobs, accommodation, employment and money. Some readers may find themselves lamenting, ‘if only it were so!’ As newly named arrivals, Simón and David, find, most people demonstrate goodwill. The rub? People are devoid of memories (in David’s case his parents are unknown), desire of any kind is virtually extinct and there are powers that be, albeit amorphous ones.
Is this, as signposted by the title, a reimagining of Jesus’s childhood? In true Coetzee style, things aren’t quite what they seem, and the reader is never sure what they should be / are thinking. It’s like a spiral that keeps on unfurling until it forms a giant question mark. Some will be befuddled and alienated, others will either willingly surrender to the writer’s hypnotic prose, rhythmic in its coolness, or partake in the book’s mischievous nature. Religious motifs abound: loaves and fish, people are ‘washed clean’ of former lives, David is seen and thinks of himself as ‘special’; the infuriating Inés to whom Simón ‘delivers’ David, is seemingly a virgin.
Also frequenting the narrative are doubleness and ambiguity. Visionaries and charlatans are difficult to differentiate and an unsettling affinity between David and the sinister Señor Daga forms. Simón is another conundrum. A zealot, he is dogged in his quest to ‘find’ David’s mother – Don Quixote captures both his and the child’s imaginations and acts as a vehicle for exploring ideas of the real and fidelity – and guided by a faith – although never phrasing it as such, the language he uses is highly mystical – that he will recognise her, although he has never met her. Whilst his sexual frustration is reasonable, his behaviour and attitudes to women are repugnant. Countering all this is his love for David, although he is constantly at pains to disabuse anyone of the notion that he is the boy’s father.
Somewhere along the way, David sings from Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’. As befits a child, he slightly bastardises it. The unabridged version tells of a father on a journey discounting his son’s fears of an evil spirit. When they arrive at their destination, the child is dead. Is this a sideways allusion to David’s fate? Once again, we can only theorise. One imagines that as we do, both publicly and privately, Coetzee will be assuming one of his enigmatic half-smiles.
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