Quiz Time: In this J.M. Coetzee novel, a professor interacts with a disadvantaged member of another race during the apartheid in South Africa.
If you guessed Disgrace, you can be forgiven. After all, the plot line is identical to this novel written nearly a decade before: Age of Iron.
The eerie similarities between the novels gave me pause during the initial pages, but Age of Iron soon veered into its own idiosyncracies that distinguished it from its more famous counterpart.
The most salient distinguishing feature is the way it graffitis its message in blunt and tumescent scrawl across the whole novel. While Disgrace manages to fold the critique of the apartheid inside the metaphor of a sexual predator, Age of Iron trumpets its attack through page-long diatribes from an academic.
It feels as though Age of Iron was a kind of warm-up for the triumph of Disgrace, as though Coetzee needed to whet his writing on a coarse block to get to a finely honed edge. This progression from blatant to subtle is usually the order of art, although in some cases it works the opposite way. Case in point: Jose Saramago, who went from the mysterious parable-like world of Blindness to the I-don’t-want-you-to-miss-it-so-I’ll-scream Seeing. It was a mistake to write that sequel (many sequels are a mistake, especially in Hollywood).
If you’re not a hardcore Coetzee fan, this is likely a novel you should skip. Disgrace levitates above most modern novels but Age of Iron muddles about on ground level. But despite Iron‘s flaws, which in addition to the moralistic bludgeoning include the hackneyed premise of a professor writing about a professor, alms for the good-hearted homeless person, and an elderly woman dying of cancer, the novel is well executed. Coetzee has an ear for dialogue and all the right knacks for crafting a story.
That’s it. A brief thought on the first novel I’ve read in 2012. I’m going to keep all these brief. My teaching load doesn’t allow me much time to write, and what time I have left over I’m mostly marking for fiction writing. But a Happy New Year to everyone. May your 2012 reading be an axe for the frozen sea inside you.
