The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee review

6 a boy who challenges the world

The final book of Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is also its darkest, keeping the
mystery at the books’ heart intact to the end

Under the stars … ‘The novel opens with David and the other local boys playing kickabout.’ Photograph: EyeEm/Alamy

Steven Poole
Sat 4 Jan 2020 07.30 GMT

M
artin Amis once complained that JM Coetzee had “got no talent”,
showing perhaps that obsessive ranking of talent (here used in a far
more debased sense than TS Eliot’s) is a pastime favoured by those who
are not, like Coetzee, writers of genius. Even more improbably, Amis
claimed that Coetzee was not funny, which bespeaks a cloth ear for the
more sophisticated kind of irony. It would certainly surprise readers of the hilarious
Slow Man, or indeed the first two novels in this sequence, The Childhood of Jesus and

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The Schooldays of Jesus, in which a dreamlike mode of nowhere and no-when
reminiscent of KaLa (and Coetzee’s own early Waiting for the Barbarians) is
illuminated by sparks of sardonic humour or sheer childlike silliness. The final book of
the trilogy, however, as one might with trepidation expect from its title, is a far darker
affair.

The remarkable child, David, whose origin and parents are unknown, is now 10 years
old, living with his guardians, Simón – the novel’s third-person observer – and Inès, in
a small town called Estrella. Having been judged too obstinate for regular schooling,
he takes only dancing and music classes at the local academy. The novel opens with
Simón watching David and the other local boys playing kickabout. As often, Coetzee
employs cliche (that device against which Amis has long been at exhausting war) for
elemental, universalising effect. “It was a crisp autumn afternoon,” reads the
deceptively easeful first line of an opening paragraph that is so studied in its normality
that the appearance near its end of “a man in a dark suit” is already powerfully
ominous.

This man is Dr Julio Fabricante, but of what exactly is he, as his surname suggests, a
maker? He is the head of the local orphanage, and wants to organise the football
kickabouts into formal matches. “You do not improve without competition,” he
remarks. “His figure is trim and radiates a palpable energy,” we later learn. What is
more, he is, as David’s music teacher Arroyo tells Simón, “a foe of book learning,
which he openly disparages”.

This Satanic or at least saturnine figure is, however, magnetic for David, who
announces to the consternation of his adoptive parents that, because he is really an
orphan, he is leaving their home to go and live in Dr Fabricante’s orphanage.
Resistance proves futile, and after a few back-and-forths David is ensconced in his
new home, his head being filled with God-knows-what. (One of the orphanage’s
teachers, Señora Devito, keeps insisting bizarrely that stars are “lumps of rock”, rather
than nuclear fireballs.) David, Arroyo thinks, “feels a certain duty toward Fabricante’s
orphans, toward orphans in general, the world’s orphans.” Which is to say everyone, at
least according to the sophistical Dr Fabricante, who muses: “What does it mean to be
an orphan? Does it simply mean that you are without visible parents? No. To be an
orphan, at the deepest level, is to be alone in the world. So in a sense we are all
orphans.”

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‘Martin Amis claimed that Coetzee [pictured] was not funny,
which bespeaks a cloth ear for the more sophisticated kind
of irony.’ Photograph: Getty

But then David gets sick. It begins with episodes in which he loses all strength in his
legs and falls over. “It feels,” the child explains, “as if the world is tilting and I am
falling off and all the air is going out of me.” At the hospital, a Dr Ribeiro is puzzled by
the case and admits David to his care as the symptoms rapidly worsen. David keeps
the nurses and other children enthralled by extemporising stories from Don Quixote,
the book from which he taught himself Spanish. There is talk of an imminent delivery
from another town of fresh blood to match David’s unusual type, but he is getting
weaker by the day, and troubled by nightmares. The child himself holds out no more
hope for his eventual recovery than the title of the novel in which he is trapped, just as
he is confined to a hospital bed.

What does Coetzee mean by referring to the child David, in these novels’ titles, as
Jesus? David does not claim supernatural ancestry, though there are hints scattered
through the books that he has been able to perform impossible acts off stage: in the
first novel, for instance, he announces that he walked unscathed through barbed wire;
in this one, people claim to have seen him flip an ordinary coin and cause it to land
heads-up 30 times in a row. David inspires those around him through his remarkable
dancing, which may recall the Gnostic tradition of Jesus as a dancing-master, as
described in the Acts of John. And there is one electric moment that is explicitly
biblical. David requests that the orphanage’s pet lamb be brought to his hospital bed,
and shows it to his pet dog, Bolívar, silently commanding the beast not to attack. Or,
as Isaiah 11.6 has it: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie
down with the young goat; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them.” But this child then falls asleep, and the dog is no
longer subject to his mastery, so the potential miracle ends in bloody deniability.

For these novels, then, “Jesus” is the name for a phenomenon that arrives from out of
nowhere and challenges our received ideas to breaking point, as David does for the
adults around him. (He arrived at the academy as a student of dance, Arroyo says, “but
soon revealed himself to be not a student but a teacher, a teacher to all of us.”) “Jesus”
is the label for a “wild creature” (as someone calls David) with a gentle contempt for

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the norms of civilisation; a disruptive force of ceaseless questioning that irrupts into
ordinary domestic existence but is not of it – as David insists, “I don’t have to be in the
universe. I can be an exception.” It is a name for an unusual child, but also perhaps for
any child; and even for the practice of literature itself. As one possibly insane
character in the novel writes to Simón: “What we hunger for is not bread […] but the
word, the fiery word that will reveal why we are here.”

As the singular David languishes in his hospital bed, he complains of the identity that
has been imposed upon him. “Why do I have to be that boy, Simón? I never wanted to
be that boy with that name.” He describes a suggestive but baffling cosmology: “Dark
stars are stars that are not numbers. The ones that are numbers shine. The dark stars
want to be numbers but they can’t. They crawl like ants all over the sky but you can’t
see them because they are too dark.” And he speaks of having a “message” that he
needs to convey to the world before it is too late, but what is it? The engine of the
novel grinds remorselessly on, but never crushes in its gears a delicate, iridescent
mystery.

The Death of Jesus by JM Coetzee is published by Vintage (RRP £18.99). To order a

copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.

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Topics
Fiction
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JM Coetzee
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