Book Review: JM Coetzee’s ‘The Childhood of Jesus’

Twice winner of the Booker Prize and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, JM Coetzee’s latest novel, The Childhood of Jesus, a story about a man and a boy, is in a word, puzzling, and raises more questions than it answers.

JM Coetzee is without question a talented writer with a string of well-respected novels to date. The Childhood of Jesus is no different in his beautiful way with ideas, turn of phrase and ability to intrigue the reader. That is where the similarity ends. In this, his most recent tome, one gets the distinct sagacity that Coetzee has set out to confound the reader. He casts out a definite hook that reels the reader in at first because of pure fascination and mystery.

To begin with, there is not one mention of Jesus except in a vaguely allegorical sense somehow linked to the characters’ diet of bread and water throughout the novel.

The narrative is quickly established from the onset. Simon and David are refugees with no memory of their pasts, aside from Simon’s unshakable sense that ‘surely there was once more to life than this’. The unlikely pair alight together, Simon having taken the motherless boy, David, under his wing during their time on a refugee ship.

From the start the sparsely populated, unconvincingly structured, distinctly socialist town of Novilla is hard to imagine. Coetzee presents the reader with a bare stage, providing only the necessary elements as the plot unfolds. The setting is difficult to relate to, wanting atmosphere, flesh, colour and detail. The reader is left with the sense that only the characters mentioned in the book actually exist. In this inadequate world where only second language Spanish is spoken and bread and water consumed, Simon gets a job as a stevedore lugging bales of grain at the wharf. Simon tries in vain to teach David about life, numbers and reading, while he sets about his most important and strange mission to find the boy’s ‘real’ mother (this is where the novel really gets peculiar).

Not only is this refugee world deficient but the people lack detail and personality. They are cooperative and obliging, but not really warm or enthusiastic, seeming content with their purposeless existence and never questioning.

At every turn Simon philosophises about work, purpose and life’s lack of depth and passion, which leads to numerous, and at times, heated discussions with anyone who will listen. Everyone else seems to be satisfied with this mundane existence apart from Simon (and perhaps the reader). He laments the popular Novilla opinion that, “From goodwill come friendship and happiness, come companionable picnics in the parklands or companionable afternoons strolling in the forest. Whereas from love, or at least from longing in its more urgent manifestations, come frustration and doubt and heartsore. It is as simple as that.”

But it’s not as simple to accept for both Simon or for the reader. Throughout the novel one has the hope that just over the next page the story will yield an explanation, an answer. Yet to the very last, the reader is left wondering. Although Simon feels that the answer lies somewhere in his memories or his future, his palpable sense of disappointment in this new world, which should be richer, more passionate, yielding more fruit and rich gravy, cannot help but be passed on to the reader.

Though undoubtedly an intriguing sojourn in Novilla, I am no closer to making sense of The Childhood of Jesus than I was when I started reading.

The Childhood of Jesus is published by Random House and is available on Amazon.co.uk