J.M. Coetzee
Summertime
Harvill Secker, 2009
272 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-1846553189

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J.M. Coetzee’s third volume of “fictionalised memoir” holds a cracked mirror up to the man as artist. Summertime consists of research notes for a biography of the recently deceased novelist John Coetzee. The book presents a series of interviews with important figures from John’s life, most of them women he has disappointed in one way or another: there is the married woman with whom he has a dead-end affair, the cousin he disappoints through his fecklessness, and the imperious Brazilian he pursues with pathetic ineptitude. What emerges, in the eyes of one, is a portrait of the artist as an “unimportant little man”.

Though Summertime is autobiographical, it is not autobiography; its account is similar to—but, crucially, not identical with—the facts of Coetzee’s life. Instead, Coetzee constructs a person he might have been, and then brutally anatomizes him. As in his previous Diary of a Bad Year (2007), Coetzee abdicates the narrative voice of his earlier work, offering control of the story to others. The fictionalised John writes in propria persona only briefly at the beginning and end of the novel, in a series of journal entries from the period and then in sketches (ostensibly from just before his death) for a planned memoir. The reader is left to piece together narrative from these fragments and the recollections of others.

The most powerful voice belongs to Adriana, a Brazilian single mother who finds herself in South Africa after her husband falls into a coma. Female desire has always been a weakness of Coetzee’s characterization (he writes more or less desexualized women well, as in Foe and Waiting for the Barbarians), so Adriana is a particularly memorable creation. Her observations turn the tables on a male perspective that has often sympathized with women’s lack of power, but has rarely succeeded in representing female sexuality.

Adriana remembers Coetzee as her daughter’s English teacher, full of heady ideas about the role of the educator, which she interprets as inappropriate advances on her child. But it is the mother whom John really desires, and his pursuit is clumsy but tenacious: he writes letters and poems that she barely glances at, takes the family for a rainy day on the beach, and, as a last straw, shows up as a student in her dance classes, where his lack of rhythm becomes a disruption. Adriana’s recollections are hilarious and acute, usurping John’s powers of description to cut him down as dancer, lover, and writer:

This man was disembodied. He was divorced from his body. To him, the body was like one of those wooden puppets that you move with strings. You pull this string and the left arm moves, you pull that string and the right leg moves. And the real self sits up above, where you cannot see him, like the puppet-master pulling the strings.

Coetzee, puppet-master of his body and his characters, pulls the strings of life, but does not appear to live it. “How could this man of yours be a great man when he was not human?” The question hangs over the book as a lingering doubt about man and artist alike. That it comes from Coetzee himself only increases its unsettling power.

Still, there is a curious evasiveness about Summertime. The image of John is a distorted one, refracted both through the memories and personalities of the speakers and through the recording of the biographer, Mr. Vincent. We learn about Vincent only through responses to him: Adriana cautions him against idolizing his subject, while another interviewee complains that he has distorted her story; Vincent’s habit of jumping to conclusions annoys all of his interlocutors. In his final interview, Vincent lays his cards on the table:

There was an image of him in the public realm as a cold and supercilious intellectual, […] Now, I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more uncertain of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

Certainly, this is the picture of John that Vincent’s interviews reveal. But is this image any truer than the “public” one? Coetzee constantly reminds us that multiple perspectives do not coalesce into a single biographical truth, but remain the fictions of an all-powerful puppet-master. The man recedes from view while the author beckons us to follow. The chase is maddening and exhilarating.

It is also melancholy, particularly in comparison with the earlier Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1997) and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II (2002), both clear-eyed but tender episodes from Coetzee’s (fictionalised) life. These short works offer precisely the kind of coherent narrative that Coetzee’s most recent novels—Diary, Slow Man (2005), and Elizabeth Costello (2003)—flaunt. In Slow Man and Costello, Coetzee introduces the novelist Elizabeth Costello as a surrogate for his own questioning. Her eccentricity, sadness, and extraordinary creative power focus attention, within a story, on the storyteller. Through Costello, Coetzee asks whether writing allows an individual to transcend his limitations, or merely to shift the burden to characters. Such deferred self-reflexivity is characteristic of his late style, with the result that Coetzee’s novels hesitate on the brink of narrative, unwilling—or unable—to cohere. Accordingly, Summertime’s final section reprints fragments of what would have been the third installment of memoir, left unfinished at Coetzee’s death. They offer tantalizing glimpses of the story he might have told, as the plurality of voices suggest the person he might have been.

The postscript to Elizabeth Costello, “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon” underscores a crisis that has conditioned Coetzee’s writing from that work forward (and which begins, suggestively, around the time Summertime’s John dies). The letter in Costello complements Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s famous “Chandos Letter”, written a century before. In Coetzee’s revision, Chandos’s wife writes in despair of her husband’s overwhelming, self-destructive attempts to find transcendent meaning in the everyday: “We are not made for revelation, I want to cry out, nor I nor you, my Philip, revelation that sears the eye like staring into the sun.” The omnipotence of the creator—for Chandos, Costello, and Coetzee alike—is blinding.

In his recent works, Coetzee turns his eyes away from the sun, relinquishing the powers of language and narrative control. “Those abstract words […] fell apart in my mouth like mouldy mushrooms”, writes Lord Chandos in Hofmannsthal’s “Letter”. Like Chandos, prototype of the modernist crisis of speech, Coetzee claims to have given up language even as he continues to write. Coetzee’s crisis, though, is a postmodern one, not of speech but of the speaker. The problem is not that he cannot speak coherently, but that he can, and all too well; his authorial power has become too strong, shaping the world around him into a reflection of himself. And so in place of a single narrative, we have a plurality of voices, none of them claiming authority.

Ultimately, this is no less a construction than the omniscient narrators of Coetzee’s earlier works. The appearance of openness is deceptive, more subtly evasive than the totalizing narrators of his earlier novels. In Summertime, the small man and the great artist appear as mise-en-abîme, infinitely reflecting and infinitely obscuring one another. The result seduces, disturbs, and compels: puppet-master and puppet are one.

Joshua Billings is reading for a DPhil in Classics at Merton College, Oxford. He is a contributing editor of the Oxonian Review.

Hans Fallada, trans. Michael Hofmann
Alone in Berlin
Penguin Classics, 2009
576 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1846140822

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Alone in Berlin, the title of Michael Hofmann’s new English translation of Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel, is far less piquant than the German original. “Everyone dies for himself alone” (Jeder stirbt für sich allein) conveys that it is dying, much more than being alone, that is at the heart of this book. Fallada, who never escaped official suspicion after his most popular novel, Little Man, What Now (1932), was banned, had ample grounds for fearing death himself. In and out of insane asylums for the last years of his life (he died in 1947, shortly after completing Alone in Berlin), he knew the fragility of existence under fascism intimately.

Alone in Berlin depicts the ordinary Germans of a working-class apartment block struggling to survive in a chaos that divides society into heroes and criminals. The real villain, though, is the terror imposed by the Nazis on all citizens, an indiscriminate process of physical and emotional violence. The first victim is the son of Otto and Anna Quangel, a soldier at the front, whose combat death is announced in the novel’s opening pages. From the Quangels’ helpless grief emerges a plot: they will write and secretly distribute postcards denouncing the party and the war effort. Fallada stirringly portrays the mild-mannered couple (inspired by a real Gestapo case file) enlivened by their subversive purpose, willing to risk certain death if caught writing what others are frightened even to think.

But the Quangels have failed to reckon with the fear that pervades their society. Not only do their cards have no discernable effect, but anyone found near such treasonous objects falls under suspicion. Fallada’s narrative is divided between the pursuers and the pursued, portraying a deadly game of cat-and-mouse in which Gestapo agents operate under the assumption that everyone is guilty of something; their job is simply to figure out what and punish it. Over the course of the novel, every sympathetic character becomes trapped in the Nazi spider web, and most go to unfortunate deaths. Fallada is not a subtle novelist, but he is a powerful one, painting in visceral strokes of good and evil. Hofmann’s translation, the first time this major novel has appeared in English, conveys all the strength of Fallada’s indictment of a regime that declared war on its own citizens, as well as on the rest of the world. For good reason, this story is told less frequently than that of Nazi atrocities against those defined as outsiders. But it deserves to be heard again.

Joshua Billings is a DPhil student at Merton College studying Classics. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Anne Carson
An Oresteia
Faber & Faber, 2009
272 pages
£18.00
ISBN 978-0865479029

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Aeschylus’s Oresteia begins in a world full of madness and ignorance, and ends in the enlightened Athenian democracy. Performed on a single day at the festival of Dionysus in 458 BC, its three plays form the only extant trilogy of Greek drama (Sophocles’s three Theban plays were written separately). The Oresteia chronicles the cursed House of Atreus through a succession of bloody actions and reactions, concluded finally by divine intervention. Its three plays teach the lesson, spoken by the chorus of elders in the Agamemnon, that “by suffering we learn;” amidst some of the most profound darkness ever staged, Aeschylus shows us the light of justice.

Anne Carson is not interested in justice. An Oresteia brings together plays of three Greek dramatists—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—to create an alternative trilogy to the Aeschylean one. Where Aeschylus (or as Carson spells the name, Aiskhylos) uses the trilogy form to trace a path from guilt to redemption, Carson uses it to pile wrong upon wrong. In place of Aeschylus’s concern for civic morality, Carson concentrates on individual psychology and the mind in extreme states. This very modern take on ancient tragedy leads her to push every element of language to its breaking point: the diction of her renderings, her frequent and apparently unmotivated line breaks, even her spellings of ancient Greek names all seem calculated to make the texts strange, abyssal, even schizophrenic.

She begins with the Agamemnon, the first and darkest play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, depicting the return of the titular king from the Trojan War and his subsequent murder by his wife and the lover she has taken in his absence. The next play, the Elektra of Sophocles, treats the same subject as Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers. Orestes, the son of the house, returns from exile, reunites with his sister Elektra, and takes revenge for their father’s murder. But Sophocles’s play is written in a far bleaker tone than Aeschylus’s. Elektra’s Elektra does not suffer decorously. Powerless in a house of murderers, “there is only one thing she can do”, Carson writes, “make noise.”

Most discomforting is the third play, Euripides’s Orestes, a late work of the last great Athenian playwright. Like the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, it considers the consequences of Orestes’s and Elektra’s revenge. In Euripides’s text, though, they are judged, not in Aeschylus’s divinely sanctioned courtroom, but by a hostile, self-interested assembly. Orestes and Elektra, condemned to death and on the brink of madness, turn murderous themselves, and are only held back from senseless slaughter by a deus ex machina that, improbably, resolves the play’s tensions. The unexpected reconciliation only makes the work more incomprehensible—pushing it, Carson suggests, toward comedy. “I wonder”, she muses, “if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic.” There may be irony, but there is no justice at the end of An Oresteia.

Carson’s biographical note tells us, somewhat disingenuously, that “she teaches Ancient Greek for a living.” Though this is true (she is appointed in the classics, comparative literature, and English departments at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), she is better known as a poet and translator, one of today’s most powerful voices for the classics. In addition to numerous volumes of poems and essays, many on classical themes, she has already brought out a collection of Euripides entitled Grief Lessons (2006), as well as a highly regarded translation of Sappho fragments, If Not, Winter (2002). Carson is attracted to the borderline between sense and nonsense—her Sappho translations feature extensive empty spaces and brackets representing lost lines—and each of the plays making up An Oresteia offers characters who seem to live in that space.

Thrust into situations awful beyond enduring, Elektra and Orestes cannot but become monsters. Euripides’s Orestes, Carson writes, “is a peculiar customer–not exactly insane but strange and unknowable”, and her translation portrays his stormy emotions and crazed hallucinations with harrowing intensity. Likewise, Carson’s translation of the role of Elektra in Sophocles’s play brings out the vehement language of her despair, transliterating her many cries directly from the Greek. Here, she responds to false news of Orestes’s death, a sadistic trick played by brother on sister (beginning with a cry that would normally be translated “oh, I am wretched”):

OI’GO TALAINA
My death begins now.

The transliterated Greek effectively breaks down any sense that we are reading (or, better, watching) a conventional character experiencing a conventional grief. For Carson, tragedy is about the individual’s confrontation with an incomprehensible chaos. All we can do, faced with such a world, is make noise.

The test of Carson’s Oresteia, though, must be the Agamemnon. First, because it is the only one of these translations that has not appeared previously (Elektra and Orestes were commissioned years apart, and for unrelated occasions), and thus should be the book’s raison d’être; and second, because Aeschylus’s profound exploration of right and wrong seems the least congenial to Carson’s psychological approach. The play demands that she treat themes outside of her comfort zone, enlarging her canvas from the individual to society as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, Carson’s sympathy lies with the Trojan captive Kassandra, brought by Agamemnon as his consort and murdered alongside him. Kassandra’s gift is the ability to see the future; her curse, never to be believed. In an extraordinary interchange with the chorus, she foretells, in broken Greek, the slaughter about to take place. “Aiskhylos”, Carson writes, “sets her in the middle of his play as a difference you cannot grasp, a glass that does not give back the image placed before it.” Carson successfully conveys the vividness and foreignness of Kassandra’s words, mingling screams, nonsense cries, and untranslated Greek in a syntax that borders on the incomprehensible:

But yes think oh think of the clear nightingale―
    gods put round her a wing
        a life with no sting
             but for me waits
             schismos
             of the double-edged sword: schismos means
             a cleaving a cutting a slipping a chopping in two

Carson’s translation is jarringly alien, itself a kind of “difference you cannot grasp”. Why does she not translate and then translate schismos? What is going on with her line breaks and spacing? She is effective at conveying the idiosyncrasies of Aeschylus’s language, his unusual compound words (“dreamvisible”) and inscrutable turns of phrase (“ox on my tongue”).

Yet Carson’s de-familiarizing translation practice means that her range of tones is quite limited where Aeschylus’s is astonishingly wide, extending from the bored watchman of the prologue to the riddling chorus of the opening odes to the brutal strength of Klytaimestra in the final scene. To stay with Kassandra, though, Carson fails to do justice to the universal force of the character’s parting words, as distilled a statement of the essence of tragedy as ever was written:

But you,
             O humans,
                                         O human things―
when a man is happy, a shadow could overturn it.
When life goes wrong, a wet sponge erases the whole picture.
You,
             you,
                       I pity.

This passage deserves better: “things” is far vaguer than the Greek “pragmata” (affairs, deeds); “when a man is happy” and “when life goes wrong” are clunky and bland; and to what does “it” refer (grammatically and logically, the happy man is the object)? Most importantly, Carson insists on the speech being addressed to “you”, where Aeschylus’s apostrophe is more general (the lines, and Kassandra’s pity, are addressed to the “human affairs”). This makes the speech sound vindictive, as if Kassandra were excluding herself from the pity. But the point is precisely the opposite: Kassandra faces her death and we must face our own; we share the same fate.

Carson seeks psychological complexity at the expense of philosophical clarity, giving short shrift to Aeschylus’s search for order in chaos. Her translation of the chorus’s high-flown rhetoric is notably flat; she has little use for talk of divine justice. Yet Aeschylus’s cosmic concern distinguishes him from the other tragedians and makes the Agamemnon so powerful and thought provoking. In An Oresteia, Carson fashions Aeschylus in her own image: psychological, skeptical, willfully estranging. But this does not give us Aeschylus at his best, or Carson at hers.

Joshua Billings is reading for the DPhil in Classics at Merton College, Oxford. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Roger Scruton
Beauty
Oxford University Press, 2009
176 pages
£10.99
ISBN 978-0199559527

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“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, begins John Keats’s Endymion. Like all platitudes, this raises more questions than it answers: does beauty remain the same over time? Are all things of beauty equal? And what, exactly, is “a thing of beauty”? Elsewhere, Keats tells us that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. But, like his other dictum, this claim may be more beautiful than true. In dealing with a concept at once so grand and so personal as beauty, perhaps a certain amount of slippage is inevitable.

Roger Scruton sets out to answer the questions raised by our tired clichés, arguing that beauty is a single quality, that its value is universal, and that it remains important to this day. Beauty, though, is no more satisfying than much of the reasoning it seeks to displace. Scruton seems unclear whether he is writing a meditation on the experience of beauty (along the lines of his England: An Elegy), a work of analytic aesthetics (as he did in the now-standard Aesthetics of Music and Aesthetics of Architecture), or (as in a recent public debate arguing that “Britain has become indifferent to beauty”) a work of cranky cultural criticism. Beauty fulfills the first aim admirably, is far too short to bear the academic weight of the second, and gives too much space to the third. In the end, the book is a frustrating mix of the personal and the academic, the profound and the petty.

Scruton’s approach is a hybrid between the classic tradition of aesthetics that tries to formulate the individual experience of beauty and twentieth-century analytical philosophy’s scrutiny of what the word “beautiful” means. In pursuing the first, phenomenological method, Scruton draws widely on authors from Plato to Alain de Botton, though what he writes is fueled more than anything by personal experience. The other, more rigorous approach leads him to identify a series of “platitudes about beauty” in the first pages of the book, to which he occasionally returns to support his observations. This mediation between common perceptions and their linguistic formulations is a typical method of analytical aesthetics, but here, in tandem with a more personal, idiosyncratic account, reducing beauty to its least controversial elements yields little fruit. In comparison with Scruton’s rich descriptions of beauty’s manifold effects, the more analytic passages feel sterile.

Scruton is committed to the view that beauty is one thing—the same in all times and places—and that the difference between spheres in which we encounter it is a difference of degree and not of kind. This makes for an illuminating account of “everyday beauty”, the modest ways humans seek to order their environment in pleasing ways. For Scruton, the way a house may fit in with its surroundings is no less important than the qualities that make a great work of architecture stand out. This notion of a continuum between “minimal beauty” and the great works of art is Scruton’s most original contribution, and grounds the argument that beauty is an essential part of human life, something that lingers long after a symphony has ended or we have turned away from a landscape. Beauty in all its forms helps us to feel at home in the world.

This is a powerful argument, and salutary in a world where beauty, conceived monolithically as the quality found in art, is often thought to be an effete indulgence. By arguing that a Rembrandt painting and a properly-set dinner table manifest the same quality, Scruton takes beauty out of the museum and places it in daily life. This does not preclude a hierarchy within beautiful objects (he has no problem judging certain works of art the “highest form of beauty”), but it gives a new dignity to lesser species of beauty that seek to fit in and suggests that the greatest artistic beauty can be the experience of ekstasis, standing out.

Yet this unitary concept of beauty also leads Scruton to be quite narrow-minded about what does and does not count. In his final chapter, Scruton examines “The Flight from Beauty”, which he sees as pervasive in contemporary society and particularly pernicious in modern art: “More recent art cultivates a posture of transgression, matching the ugliness of the things it portrays with an ugliness of its own. Beauty is downgraded as something too sweet, too escapist and too far from realities to deserve our undeceived attention.”

This rings of the denunciations that have accompanied changes in art throughout history, from Aristophanes’ satire of Euripides in the Frogs to polemics against Impressionism and the even more vehement debates surrounding Modernism. Undeniably, art today admits of more chaos than it has in the past; but, as Scruton recognizes, dissonance has always been a part of art. Indeed, many of the most powerful works dance on the edge of ugliness (think of Greek tragedy or Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron). Great art can—and sometimes should—unsettle us.

This mixing of pleasurable and unpleasurable impressions is often called “the sublime” in contrast to “the beautiful”, though Scruton might describe it as a kind of beauty that stands out radically. Contemporary art often resists the viewer; its beauty must be won from confrontation. But in an age that has seen man’s powers of destruction increase thousandfold, and finds itself regularly saturated with images of violence and suffering, an untroubled sense of harmony, like that we find in the Botticelli portrait on Scruton’s cover, may indeed feel illusory. Beauty seems not to be at home in the world, today more radically than ever. Our age, as the French theorist Lyotard argued, is more oriented toward the sublime than the beautiful.

Scruton deplores this sublime tendency in contemporary art. But in doing so, he assumes too narrow a concept of what beauty is. Many of the most successful works of the past half-century—think Anselm Kiefer’s brutalist sculptures or Harold Pinter’s violent, inscrutable dramas—achieve a sublime effect through confrontation with ugliness, a flight from beauty that leads back to the beautiful. Instead of detachment and clarity, these pieces offer an intense engagement that is no less a way of making the world our own. This can be jarring and even off-putting at first, but so have been most new means of creating beauty throughout history.

As Scruton argues, the best works of art always make us feel at home in the world. But today they do so by recognizing and incorporating the world’s ugliness, making what is beautiful stand out more wondrous and more strange.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, writing his dissertation on Greek tragedy and German philosophy. He is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Doctor Atomic by John Adams
English National Opera
Directed by Penny Woolcock
The London Coliseum
Running until 20 March 2009

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John Adams is America’s great hope for grand opera. He is among the country’s best-known classical composers and probably the only one to bridge the gap between critical and popular acclaim. His works, whether scored for string quartet or choral ensemble, are eminently dramatic, appealing directly to the emotions in a way that has long gone out of fashion. Adams’s music originates in minimalism, but finds inspiration in a wide variety of sources, such as Renaissance polyphony, the Romantic orchestral tradition and American folk music.

No contemporary composer is in a better position to commandeer the forces of a major opera house and produce a success that would achieve that elusive goal of operatic immortality: entering the standard repertory. Since World War II, such success has largely been limited to works that eschewed musical modernism and looked back to the grand tradition familiar to opera audiences. For better or worse, opera audiences seem to demand an expansive, accessible mode of expression, and this is precisely what Adams’s music offers.

Adams has essayed the genre twice before, with Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), both of which attracted loyal followings but never entered the mainstream. Doctor Atomic, premiered at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 and currently running in a revised staging at the English National Opera, is his strongest effort to date. Created with long-time collaborator Peter Sellars, it tells the story of the atomic bomb’s first test, focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, cultured physicist and leader of the Manhattan Project. The subject matter—a turning point in 20th century history, remembered across the world with vehemence and passion—has huge dramatic potential. “These are Wagnerian topics,” Adams is quoted in the programme, “ideally suited to operatic expression.”

Doctor Atomic’s ambitions are, in their own way, no less grand than those of the scientists working in New Mexico in 1945. No homegrown American opera has entered the international repertory to date. Indeed, those that come closest (George Gershwin’s 1935 Porgy and Bess, Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 Candide and Philip Glass’s 1980s “portrait” operas Akhnaten and Satyagraha) were successful largely because they avoided the dramatic conventions and musical language of European grand opera. The Wagnerian ambitions of Adams and Sellars suggested that Dr. Atomic would confront the tradition head-on; the work, dubbed alternately an “American Faust” and “Prometheus” would be a contemporary, new-world Götterdämmerung.

Doctor Atomic is not the explosion it might have been, but it is nonetheless a stunning conflagration. Adams’s music offers some moments of gripping drama and is never less than engaging. Yet the effect of the piece as a whole is frustratingly uneven, as critics have remarked since its premiere. The English National Opera’s production, first seen at the Metropolitan Opera in October of last year, might have lain to rest lingering doubts about the piece. It is staged not by Sellars, but by Penny Woolcock, a British film director who has worked with Adams previously in film. The reasons for the change, particularly striking given that Sellars and Adams conceived and wrote the piece together, were made public when Peter Gelb, the general manager at the Met, said in a New Yorker profile that he had loved the music, but the production “wasn’t realizing its potential”. Though the music was an unqualified success, Sellars’s staging, Gelb said, was “undramatic”.

Gelb was right about the effect, but wrong about its cause. The opera, as the English National Opera’s production establishes, did not lack drama because of Sellars’s staging, but because of its structure and libretto. The only action of the opera consists in waiting for the bomb to be tested. The text, a patchwork of myriad sources—historical, scientific and literary—creates drama obliquely: the characters express themselves largely in highly stylised, artificial language. Where the original staging was conceived in the same alien idiom as Sellars’s text (unmotivated gestures, dance sequences unconnected to the narrative), Woolcock’s staging seeks to mitigate the work’s dramatic idiosyncracies. The change is well-intentioned, but it creates a sense of incoherence between words and actions, and makes the libretto all the more inscrutable.

Most troubling is the lack of structure in the piece as a whole. Carried by Adams’s compelling music, the expository scenes of the first act manage to eschew the problems of the opera’s dramatic structure. The vocal and orchestral scores are sensitive to the opera’s dramatic context, and frame each episode and encounter subtly. The act ends with Gerald Finley’s Oppenheimer, alone on stage for the first time, singing John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” The alien beauty of the words, the pounding orchestral accompaniment, and Finley’s lone, tortured voice combine in one of the most powerful moments I have ever experienced in an opera house.

In the second act, however, the opera’s structural deficiencies reveal themselves: there is little to do but wait. We can enjoy the variety of Adams’s music, but the narrative urgency of the first act is gone. The dramatic pace lags badly and we do not feel the tension the characters are experiencing. In these scenes, when the entire focus is on expression, the failure of Sellars’s libretto to confront emotion head-on is particularly frustrating. It is not until the final scene that the piece finds its footing again, as we and the characters wait anxiously for the explosion, unsure whether to hope for success or failure.

The ambivalence we feel waiting for the blast points to the difficulties of staging an opera based on so destructive an event in world history. Sellars and Adams are clearly attracted to the moral implications of the test. In the first scene, scientists discuss whether and how the bomb should be used after Germany’s surrender, and Oppenheimer repeatedly conveys his sense of awful responsibility (whether he felt it at the time is another question). The opera’s attitude, clear from the production notes as well, is a reflexive pacifism that judges the test of the bomb in light of its later use and condemns it unequivocally. But the treatment of guilt remains distressingly shallow, as if the test of the bomb were in itself an evil—which is not necessarily the case, even if one believes that the use of the bomb was a crime against humanity. This simplistic moralising might be excusable were it not an abject dramatic failure. Sellars and Adams do not portray the genuine moral conflict of the Los Alamos scientists, the aspect that might make their work a tragedy in the fullest sense: that in doing what they believe to be right, they unleash huge evil on the world.

The musical performance is a triumph for the English National Opera under the baton of Lawrence Renes. Stretched by a complex score in which no moment is like the last, the orchestra plays with passion and accuracy. The singing is excellent throughout, with special mention going to Edward Sherrat’s sinister Edward Teller and Met Young Artist Sasha Cooke, an astonishingly mature Kitty Oppenheimer. Gerald Finley has sung Oppenheimer in every performance of the opera since the premiere, and one can hardly imagine anyone else in the role, so commanding is his presence on stage.

Doctor Atomic leaves our hopes for Adams unfulfilled but intact, and even more urgent. One eagerly awaits the moment when his talent as composer fuses with the right libretto. Until then, we will watch like the Los Alamos scientists waiting all night for the test, wagering on the power of the blast. What have they created? When will they succeed? Doctor Atomic does not realise all its ambitions, but it provides moments of explosive drama, and leaves us anxious for Adams’s next experiment.

Joshua Billings is a doctoral student in Classics at Merton College, Oxford, where he is writing his dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800.

Photograph of John Adams © Margaretta Mitchell

William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Donmar West End
Directed by Michael Grandage
Running until 7 March 2009

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Donmar West End’s production of Twelfth Night aspires to the condition of music, but never finds the right pitch. A string quartet’s angry chord brings Orsino, tormented by his unrequited love for the countess Olivia, on stage. It is a brutal blast of sound, overwhelming any hint of tenderness. This music might feed murderous rages, but it is certainly not “the food of love”. Viola, shipwrecked on a strange island, misses her music too, almost shouting her way through some of Shakespeare’s saddest, most melodious words: “What should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium.” Most offensive of all, though, are the songs. The clown Feste begins well enough, accompanying himself on the guitar. Without warning, though, a chorus of strings enters, piped in through the sound system, utterly obliterating the beautiful simplicity of a single voice and instrument.

These all may seem trivial points against Michael Grandage’s extravagantly praised production. But they are symptomatic of a staging deaf to subtlety and nuance, one that plays Shakespeare’s comedy at a constant and unremitting fortissimo. The central performances are almost uniformly overwrought, and there is little in the direction that suggests a deeper understanding of the play’s dynamics. The production as a whole falls prey to some lamentable fashions in West End theatre: bland design, unimaginative direction and, most disappointingly, central performances that rely more on technique than psychological acuity.

Like Grandage’s first production of the Donmar West End season, which showcased Kenneth Branagh as Chekhov’s Ivanov, the staging of Twelfth Night is little more than a star vehicle. Sir Derek Jacobi has a grand old time as the inflated butler Malvolio, giving a master class in pomposity to match Branagh’s earlier one in states of despair. Jacobi is extremely funny, as Branagh was extremely bleak. However, both performances showcase far more their virtuosity as actors than their sensitivity to character. The challenges of the roles are quite different, but both require moments of extreme rawness to rise above stereotype. For all their extraordinary talents, neither Branagh nor Jacobi can quite conjure the depths. As a consequence, they seem like great actors in less-than-great roles.

Ivanov allows an actor many moments of high drama, but the young Chekhov’s lines do not live up to the despair of the character. Between Ivanov’s words and actions there is a gap that Branagh’s performance, very much in the classical vein of language-driven theatre, elided. The play Ivanov can be powerful and even shattering, but only when we feel the character’s failure of communication acutely. The words came too easily to Branagh (this may be partly the fault of Tom Stoppard’s immensely fluid translation); the character was too composed, too heroic. His finest moment was the one when speech failed, an extended silence as he slumped to the ground in desperation. When Branagh opened his mouth, though, it was impossible to forget that he is one of the stage’s greatest speakers. I left the theatre impressed, but not moved.

Malvolio, however, should be a star turn, as Ivanov should not. Jacobi, by no means as showy an actor as Branagh, lends the role an appropriately heroic silliness. The physicality is perfectly calibrated to Malvolio’s pompous, declamatory speech, which Jacobi delivers as if he were chewing the scenery as Macbeth or Hamlet. Indeed, he seems to be on autopilot, enjoying his romp too much to bring out more in the character than the obvious. This is particularly frustrating in the scene where Malvolio’s makes his final appearance after being humiliated, imprisoned, and nearly driven mad by a prank gone out of control. The moment, which can be a stinging indictment of the lovers’ giddy world turned upside-down, is for Jacobi another chance to go over the top. In his angry cadenza, he misses Malvolio’s extraordinary silence, the way language fails him utterly in responding to the malicious trick. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is of a different register from the rest of Malvolio’s speech: visceral and angry, after all pretence. It is neither heroic nor anti-heroic; it is merely deflated. But Jacobi has not stopped being a star, and his delivery remains in the high style; he does not sink to the occasion.

Perhaps due to Jacobi’s magnetism, the central love triangle seems largely forgotten, and with it, the romance of the play. Though many reviewers have praised the Viola of Victoria Hamilton, I found her performance undynamic. As she finds herself dressed as a boy, in love with her employer Orsino, and wooing Olivia on his behalf (who in turn falls for the her/him), we do not feel the humor of the situation, only its confusion. Indira Varma’s Olivia displays a cold intellect when resisting advances, but fails to conjure the vulnerability of her own passion. As Orsino, Mark Bonnar gets no better after the misjudged entrance; he remains at a high pitch of self-regard throughout, too much a bore to be convincing as a lover. Where the play demands a delicate three-way choreography of desire and frustration, none seems very attentive to what the others are doing. As a result, we see isolated performances, never an ensemble.

The romantic leads could not be more of a contrast to the raucous assemblage of nobles and domestics that torment Malvolio and provide the play’s low comedy: an appropriately hulking Andrew Aguecheek from Guy Henry, Zubin Varla’s acrobatic, ethereal Feste; best of all, the couple of Ron Cook’s Sir Toby and Samantha Spiro’s Maria has never been quite so tender. The quartet’s scenes capture the joyful dance music of Shakespeare’s text, making their humiliation of Malvolio all the more dissonant. They prove such a centering force for the production that the main love triangle seems marginal in comparison (this is partly Shakespeare’s fault, admittedly—the play’s noble characters are singularly boring). We want to remain with Jacobi and his antagonists below stairs.

The unevenness, perhaps, was to be expected. The poster for the season gave it away: it shows four famous faces (still to come are Judi Dench and Jude Law) staring out at us, dressed in modish black. The publicity for the individual plays again focuses on the lead’s face, without costume or context. We come to see the actors, not the characters; the players, not the play.

This ethos seems to have penetrated the design. Grandage’s productions have been calibrated perfectly so as not to draw attention to themselves. They are attractive but unatmospheric: monolithic, multi-purpose sets; sharp, unobtrusive costumes; most of the visual drama comes from overly dark chiaroscuro lighting. Exchanges are lively and fast-paced—too fast either for Stoppard’s Chekhov or Shakespeare’s language. Dialogue seems designed to get us on, as quickly as possible, to the star’s next moment.

There is nothing wrong with showcasing great actors, and we should be grateful to have Branagh and Jacobi on the London stage when they could be engaged in far more lucrative and less taxing projects. But the problem is that the productions have abdicated any more ambitious goals. Grandage’s direction sterilizes the vodka-soaked desperation of Ivanov’s characters, just as it reduces the intricate counterpoint of Twelfth Night to monotone. These productions ultimately have the effect of dwarfing their stars, doing an injustice to playwright, play and player.

Star-craziness, of course, is not limited to the Donmar. Everywhere one looks in London theatre these days, it is clear that stars sell. Perhaps they are the only way to sell serious, classic theatre (think of Ian McKellen in Lear, Ralph Fiennes in Oedipus, or David Tennant in Hamlet). There is nothing wrong with such productions, but the involvement of big names only increases the burden for a staging to bring something unexpected. The familiarity of player and play creates an even greater need for a director to imagine the work freshly, and for actors to push beyond their comfort zones. Star-driven shows are valuable for the chance to see well-known faces in new masks. They should challenge audience and actor by exploring unexpected dimensions of a familiar presence. As Branagh demonstrated (if all too briefly), this means playing the music of silence.

Joshua Billings is writing his doctoral dissertation on the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800 at Merton College, Oxford.

Joshua Billings

“We must everywhere present myth more demonstrably,” wrote the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin in notes to accompany his Sophocles translations. “More demonstrable:” more relevant to the present, more comprehensible in modern terms, more our own. Myth dies when it is merely received, taken as a finished work to be enjoyed and then discarded. It must be demonstrated anew in the act of retelling. Myth transforms its listeners into tellers.

Or readers into writers. This is the premise of Canongate’s Myths series, which collects literary retellings of myths from writers all over the world. The project’s scope extends to myths from a variety of different cultures and tellers from diverse literary traditions. Since the project was launched in 2005, nine volumes have appeared, with more to come. The series aims to make myth vital again by demonstrating that it is an activity for the present, not a canon frozen in the past. Rather than mindlessly repeating the old myths or hubristically trying to create new ones ex nihilo, we should make the existing myths more our own.

The results are, as one would expect in a project of such wide scope, mixed. I read the three most recent offerings, and was disappointed to find them rather more stale than fresh. Two of the volumes, Su Tong’s Binu and the Great Wall and Salley Vickers’s Where Three Roads Meet, largely failed due to a lack of boldness in appropriating their stories for the present. Boldness is nowhere lacking in Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, by far the most successful of the three, though occasionally its audacity shades over into silliness. The project overall is an exciting one, but its products so far betray a certain lack of imagination.

Binu and the Great Wall is a retelling of one of China’s most cherished myths, and suffers from an excess of reverence for its story, a reluctance to bring out any relevance it might hold for readers today. A woman goes in search of her husband, who has been abducted to work on the construction of the Great Wall. Learning that he has died in the brutal working conditions, her tears and lamentations are so powerful that the Wall itself falls. The design of the tale is epic—a long journey to reach an uncertain goal, and Binu consists of an episodic narration of the journey from the woman’s home in Peach Village to the site of her husband’s death.

Odysseys, and Binu surely is one, are difficult to bring off successfully, since their stories dictate no clear arch, only a beginning and an end. They can expand or contract at the will of the author, and require a constant stream of innovation to keep the reader’s interest. Making such a story engaging for the present requires that the author reinvent not just the relatively confined set of characters and relationships that make up most myths, but the entire diversity of a place and time. In retelling the myth of Meng, Tong must bring the China of the First Emperor (roughly 200 BCE) to life for an audience two millennia and thousands of miles distant.

Binu and the Great Wall does not live up to this ambition. Part of the problem may be Howard Goldblatt’s translation, which attempts a simple, poetic style, but largely sounds strained, with the prose oddly flat. But even more fundamentally, the episodic structure does not have the vibrancy to sustain its 300 pages. Binu’s journey quickly becomes monotonous: the people and places she encounters are unmemorable, recurring elements show no development, and character remains static throughout. The narrative plods along with her, each new episode only vaguely distinct from the last.

Binu’s recounting of its story feels obligatory, unmotivated by any pressing need to remake the myth’s meaning. For the most part, Tong seems content with docile archaisation, which makes the story feel tired, without relevance to contemporary readers. Binu feels like cautious repetition rather than original demonstration.

Where Three Roads Meet, by psychoanalyst and author Salley Vickers, shows a good deal more ingenuity, though little more success. Unlike Tong, Vickers does make an attempt to imagine her myth, the story of Oedipus, anew. She tells it in the voice of Tiresias, the blind seer, who recounts his life as a prophet and the story of Oedipus from his perspective as witness. His interlocutor throughout is Sigmund Freud, whose reading of Oedipus’s life in the context of psychoanalysis remains perhaps the most powerful demonstration of the myth’s modernity. The conceit is promising, especially as it is linked to a particularly fascinating time in Freud’s life, his exile in England after the Austrian capitulation to the Nazis. There is a neat parallel between Tiresias’s blindness and Freud’s increasing inability to speak due to long-standing and painful complications from jaw cancer. Vickers’s story has all the makings of a true reimagining, bringing three mythologised men together to explore the potential of their common stories.

Vickers’s execution, though, frustratingly leaves its potential unrealised. Even with the possibilities of three myths to draw from, she plays it safe, sticking more or less to a narration of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (with a quick look to Oedipus at Colonus as a coda) and the party line of Freudian psychoanalysis. She rarely probes or questions, and adds little to the piles of interpretation of both men. Oedipus appears in no new light, and Freud’s commentary is reduced to cute quips.

Suggestively, Vickers fills in some of Tiresias’s history, recounting the experiences (some of them mythical, some invented) that shaped the seemingly implacable character we know from Sophocles. Yet there is nothing original even here: Tiresias’s blinding, his years as a woman, his life in Thebes are all sketched for the doctor, who interprets them in tired psychoanalytic terms. What emerges is not a living myth that continues to pose questions and problems, but one interpreted into inertness. The exercise becomes utterly predictable, too reverential towards both Socrates and Freud to demonstrate any new relevance.

Can myth today be anything but a museum piece? Yes, as Ali Smith makes brilliantly clear in her Girl Meets Boy, a retelling of Ovid’s comparatively little-known story of Iphis and Ianthe. Perhaps the obscurity of the story is part of her success—it is easier to be irreverent towards a few lines of Ovid’s encyclopedic collection than the most revered myth of one’s country or the most interpreted play of all time. But there is more: Smith has departed further than either Tong or Vickers from her source, and in the process thrown in contemporary takes on issues of gender and sexuality (which are undoubtedly present in Ovid), as well as global capitalism and its effect on the environment (which are not).

Ovid’s story explores sexual ambiguity in a tight form: the baby girl Iphis is raised by her mother, in cahoots with the goddess Isis, as a boy, fulfilling the father’s desire for a male child. Iphis falls in love with another girl, Ianthe, and the two are engaged. Before their wedding, the goddess Isis returns to change Iphis into a boy, allowing the marriage to go forward. Smith retains Ovid’s happy ending (indeed, part of what draws her to the story seems to be its unusually light touch in the context of the Metamorphoses), but dispenses with the transformation: after some fairly trivial tribulations, the love between the two girls is accepted and celebrated by friends and family.

Smith runs the risk here of creating something quite banal, a literary advertisement for lesbian love. She dances even closer to the cliff of silliness by giving her two lovers a foil in a homophobic, anorexic, success-obsessed sister working for that greatest of evils, a bottled water company. The book turns into a contest between the forces of good (the environmentalist, anti-capitalist couple) and evil (the environment-destroying, crassly capitalist corporation) for the sister’s soul. It is an unfair fight, and no divine intervention is needed to reach Smith’s happy ending.

Yet Girl Meets Boy is a joy to read. It is told alternately in the breathless voices of two sisters: the bored adolescent who falls in love with a girl, and her responsible, scandalised older sister. Love’s first sight is overpoweringly corporeal:

My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened wide inside me and in came the ocean.

The voice is colloquial but evocative, simultaneously unpretentious and literary (all those metaphors, stretched to their breaking point!). Smith’s prose is often challenging in its leaps and turns, and this complexity saves it from the potential banality of her subjects (as was also the case in her most recent novel, The Accidental).

As in Smith’s other novels, we begin in medias res, and it takes the reader some time to catch up with what is actually going on. Reading is often dizzying and disconcerting. But by the time we come to the happy ending, an imagined wedding party attended by a chorus of characters, living and dead, from the novel and Greek mythology, we have learned to revel in Smith’s rhapsodic, non-linear narration. Her playful prose and exposition create a pleasant sense of mayhem, but one so expertly controlled that it never spins off into chaos.

Smith’s audacity in reimagining her story, her willingness to find radically new meanings, is what makes Girl Meets Boy such a pleasure. There is nothing exceptional in Ovid’s plot, nor even in Smith’s “remix” of it (a contrast to the much more pregnant myths of Meng and Oedipus). Its power lies in the craft of its telling, the meanings Smith is able to wring out of her material. She relies on her own powers to enliven the story, rather than expecting the story to bear the burden of its repetition. Smith’s style animates myth, making its meaning as robust today as it was in Roman times. She fulfills Hölderlin’s dictum, making Ovid’s myth more demonstrable, more present, more our own.

Joshua Billings studies the German reception of ancient Greek tragedy in Merton College, Oxford.

J.M. Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year
Harvill Secker, 2007
304 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-1846551208

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While J. M. Coetzee’s themes have hardened in recent years, his forms have gained new flexibility.  Like its predecessors Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, his latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, toys with and occasionally explodes its genre, while focusing on central characters bearing undeniable resemblance to Coetzee himself.  These three latest works deal with the issues that have preoccupied Coetzee throughout his career as a novelist – the act of writing, belief, sympathy.  What is new in them is a melancholy scepticism towards some of the foundations of Coetzee’s art.  They form a trilogy of doubt, calling into question Coetzee’s political activism, his previous works, and most troublingly, the ethics of the novel.

Elizabeth Costello presented a series of ‘eight lessons’ involving the title character, an aging novelist with a biography not so different from Coetzee’s own.  The lessons range from a lecture in which Costello surprises her audience with a passionate defence of animal rights (a lecture Coetzee himself has delivered) to a Kafkaesque exploration of a way-station in the afterlife—all different, all unsettling, none providing an instant of certainty.  We perhaps find a kind of unity in the book’s beautiful, enigmatic coda, the ‘Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon’.  Coetzee takes on the persona of the wife of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s crisis-stricken Lord Chandos, whose words provide a kind of epigram to the disconnected lessons: ‘I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything.’  Coherence was precisely what the book eschewed, preferring fragmentary form and ambiguous identification, as if Lord Chandos had managed to write a novel.  Elizabeth Costello seemed to be witnessing a disenchantment with the very enterprise of novel writing, and was interpreted by some as Coetzee’s farewell to literature.
But in Coetzee’s books no answer is final, and his next offering, Slow Man, seemed at first to return to the bread-and-butter of his earlier writing.  Paul Rayment, a retired photographer disabled by a biking accident, struggles with his own physical decline while lusting after his Croatian nurse Marijana.  The plot is familiar Coetzee: a battered older man looks to a battered younger woman for a kind of salvation (think Disgrace).  Then, the novel implodes: Elizabeth Costello knocks on Paul’s door, quoting the first sentence of the novel.  From there, the narrative flies in fascinating and unexpected directions, exploring the ethics of writing another person’s story while simultaneously telling those of Paul, Marijana, and Elizabeth.  Elizabeth’s role is ambiguous: she is, at once, transcribing a story that comes to her through some unknown agency, watching the story unfold in person, and, for both good and bad, affecting its unfolding at every turn.  Ultimately, it is Coetzee himself under question: can the sympathy of a novelist be a kind of violence?

It is no surprise that Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, as well as Diary of a Bad Year, are preoccupied with their status as novels.  A consciousness of the tradition of the novel has always been a part of Coetzee’s writing.  This has led many to associate him with the postmodernism of DeLillo and Pynchon, but Coetzee views the history and form of the novel not so much as a field for play, but as a burden to be overcome.  Life and Times of Michael K, for example, seemed to view South Africa through Kafka’s eyes, following the great modernist by depicting a weak individual in a world transfigured by an unknown, unknowable, and destructive force.  Dostoyevsky himself was the main character of The Master of Petersburg, returning to the city formerly his muse to uncover the truth about his son’s death.  Most extreme in questioning the novel was Foe (a pun on Daniel Defoe), which depicted a female counterpart to Robinson Crusoe struggling for recognition in the works of the novelist Foe.  The book indicted Crusoe’s colonialist England (an undeniable, if implicit, criticism of Coetzee’s apartheid South Africa) and the gender roles and assumptions of Defoe’s time and the present. And all in the words of a white male writer.  For all its self-consciousness, though, Foe seemed unable to be anything but a novel; it existed to tell a story.  A story of stories, but ultimately one not so different from that of Coetzee’s foe Foe.  It departed from the traditional novel primarily in extending its sympathetic power to subjects usually silent.  It did not, as does the latest trilogy of novels, fundamentally problematise this sympathy.

Sympathy is perhaps Coetzee’s greatest theme, and the form of Diary of a Bad Year could be construed as an exploration of the act of identifying with the other.  The novel presents two voices speaking and writing in three continuous threads: two of these belong to an aging narrator (who shares Coetzee’s name and past), the third to Anya, a neighbour he meets, lusts after, employs, and ultimately befriends.  ‘C’ (as he is known to Anya, and as we will call him, to avoid getting too deeply into the questions of authorship the book so bluntly poses) is writing a series of ‘Strong Opinions’ to be collected and published by a German press. They are a mixed bag: at one end of the spectrum are thoughtful meditations (‘On Zeno’, ‘On the afterlife’); at the other are angry polemics written in the shrill, moralising tone familiar from Coetzee’s political statements (‘On Tony Blair’, ‘On political life in Australia’).  In counterpoint to these opinion pieces runs the first-person narrative of their author as he meets and befriends Anya.  The first chapters of the book are limited to these two threads of C’s voice, each occupying a portion of the page, without clear dialogue between them.  They depict a man of waning potency and increasing isolation from the world around him, yet impelled by a sense of that world’s inhumanity to rage against it.

Before long, Anya also starts speaking, narrating their meeting from her own perspective.  The facts at first seem to coincide: both relate more or less the same experience of wary approach (he lusts after her, she knows it) and an unstable dance of distance and intimacy as she accepts a job typing C’s opinions. In time we learn that Anya’s boyfriend Alan is plotting to rob C electronically.  The triangle feels slightly contrived (especially the robbery motive, which borders on the sensational and is not sufficiently grounded in anything we know of Alan), and predictably comes to an ugly head when the three meet at a dinner party C throws to celebrate the book’s completion.  C’s voice falls temporarily silent and Anya is left to narrate Alan’s drunken verbal assault alone.  From this climax, the relationships, so carefully constructed, unravel.  Anya leaves Alan and the city, and C begins a ‘Second Diary’ of opinions, sadder and perhaps wiser than the first.

Over the course of the novel, Anya’s voice gradually takes over from C’s.  The ‘Second Diary’ is a response to her opinions about his opinions.  Her farewell letter forms the final part of C’s story, and her passages grow longer and her character fuller as the book progresses.  The counterpoint of the two voices is often poignant, though it is made uneasy by their lack of common ground.  The introduction of this second voice is Diary of a Bad Year’s most radical step, and to my mind, where it goes wrong.  Sympathy has always been unidirectional in Coetzee’s works—the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, for example,or David Lurie in Disgrace, both self-sufficient solitary men tested in their powers of identification by creatures, human and animal, that they cannot fully comprehend.  Indeed, Coetzee’s concern with animal rights is based on the principle that those who cannot reciprocate also demand our moral attention.  His preoccupation has been sympathy for an object we cannot fathom.

Diary of a Bad Year presents an optimistic solution to the problem of the novelist’s authority that has so weighed on Coetzee in recent years.  It seeks to abdicate this authority, to open it to another voice.  Two sympathetic voices coexist in the text, each seeking and failing to understand the other, each with wholly different concerns and motivations.  They speak about, around, and occasionally to one another, without ever attaining genuine recognition.  As if to underline this point, their stories are told in different temporal frames.  The perspectives do not coincide in reading any more than they do in the story.  In a sense, this kind of reciprocity is the logical conclusion to Coetzee’s project, a final proof of the incommensurability of subject and object.  But it also brings us back to the recurrent fear that nags all sympathy in Coetzee: is the object really worthy?

Diary of a Bad Year’s sympathy, though reciprocal, is frustratingly asymmetrical.  We hear both voices, but only one feels fully imagined.  While the narrator speaks to us with the authority of a lifetime of writing and thinking, Anya’s voice is juvenile and often annoying. When we first meet her, she does not seem to warrant any interest—either C’s or the reader’s.  The early passages in her voice suggest that she is little more than what C first perceives her as: a body for sex.  ‘When I make my silky moves,’ she writes, ‘I can feel his eyes lock onto me. That is a game between him and me.  I don’t mind.  What else is your bottom for?  Use it or lose it.’  Coetzee’s regard for his object has always made an ethical demand on the sympathy of the reader, but when the object speaks in this voice, it is hard to comply.

Coetzee’s art works by creating an ethical compulsion to sympathise out of the aesthetic urge to identify.  Without this hard-won identification (which the reader feels twice, with both the subject and the object of sympathy) the novel’s ethical import falls flat.  We need the depth of one of Coetzee’s great protagonists to follow them in assuming an ethical obligation.  Here, Coetzee has resorted to a disappointingly crude characterisation of his lead female character.  True, she does not remain so shallow.  By the end, much of her self-absorption and immaturity have fallen away, and she writes C a deeply felt letter of farewell.  Yet even this development feels trivial, a cliché we know all too well from My Fair Lady.  Galatea should have remained a statue.

C’s passages, by contrast, show the moral weight typical of Coetzee’s characters, a restless need to understand what it is to be human.  For C, the question is particularly pressing at what he knows to be the end of his life: ‘Perhaps it is the nature of death that everything about it, every last thing, should strike us as unsuitable.’  This profound attempt to extract some kind of universal truth leads C always to imagine the other:

Whose heart is so hardened as to feel no sympathy at all for the man who, his family having been killed in an Israeli strike, straps on the bomb-belt in full knowledge that there is no paradise of houris waiting for him, and in grief and rage goes out to destroy as many of the killers as he can? No other way than death is a marker and perhaps even a definition of the tragic.

Tragedy is endemic to Coetzee’s world view; his protagonists find themselves in worlds that offer no solace, except perhaps that of the audience at a tragic drama, of catharsis from pity and fear.
 

Diary of a Bad Year seems to aim for recognition, for a mutual ethical commitment between its two voices.  Yet the attempt fails.  Sympathy is not, and perhaps cannot be, premised on reciprocity.  It must be one-sided, imaginative.  This is why the genre of the novel has served Coetzee so well.  It is premised on a reader’s sympathetic identification.  Coetzee’s concern is the process of identification that makes literature possible.  His novels thus thematize their own reading.  This may be the root of his interest in novelistic form.  As the outside world seems more and more to erode the capacity for sympathy, (a prospect, C’s opinions show, that is ultimately Coetzee’s greatest fear), Coetzee’s latest novels have come to question the ethics of identification, beginning with the novelist’s own.  Diary of a Bad Year pins its hopes on recognition, which seems to offer a more comprehensive ethical commitment.

But this transformative experience of recognition, of seeing and being seen, is not the province of the novel, which, for Coetzee at least, is inextricably tied to the subjectivity of its narrator.  The protagonists of Coetzee’s novels have always used others as mirrors in which to see themselves.  In Coetzee’s recent works, this one-sidedness has become problematic: the mirror now demands a voice as well.  Diary of a Bad Year thus proposes a solution to the complex ethics of sympathy exposed in Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man.  But the solution diminishes the unflinching scrutiny of self and world that make Coetzee’s novels so powerful.  By introducing a second subjectivity, Coetzee seems to be attempting to counterbalance the authority of the first, but ultimately only dilutes the moral claim intrinsic to a novel’s subject. It strives towards an objectivity that is foreign to Coetzee’s art of the novel.  In attempting to transcend its novelistic character, Diary of a Bad Year points us towards recognition in our own lives, but this is an ethical achievement, not an aesthetic one.

Joshua Billings studies the German reception of Greek tragedy at Merton College, Oxford.