Age of Iron

In this novel first published in 1990, Mr Coetzee gives the grim account of both a human being facing imminent death and a country - South Africa - still immersed in the tragedy of the apartheid regime. Mrs Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, has just received the fatal news from her doctor, Dr Syfert, that she suffers from an incurable form of cancer. Part of the narrative consists in an imaginary letter Mrs Curren will never write to her daughter who left for America in 1976. Indeed she does not consider it to be just to share her burden with her daughter but, as she puts it, "to resist the craving to share my death", "to take my leave without bitterness" and "to embrace death as my own, mine alone." But since it is nearly impossible for her to approach death without the support of another human being, she ends up sharing her thoughts and life with Mr Vercueil, a tramp she finds one morning sleeping in the garden of her house. Death is omnipresent in Mr Coetzee's work, not only Mrs Curren's but in the townships of Cape Town where the lives of the coloureds are worth next to nothing and therefore death is as common as life for the people obliged to live there. A powerful, sad and unforgettable tale whose characters and events cut to the bone.

This book really takes us inside just how disconcerting life must be, must have been, within the waning years of Apartheid for those whites in South Africa who grew up with this horrendous system yet could not contemplate their lives with out it, even if they were not actively racist themselves. The female lead's, and Coetzee always astounds me with his writing from a female perspective (I wonder if actual females would agree), confusion in dealing with the later years of Apartheid allow us to view in sympathy those whites caught up in the system by circumstance while not ignoring the great tragedy that Apartheid was to the Black majority. It also sheds a light on the perception issues that we face in the United States across the racial divide.

After finishing Coetzee's Booker-prize winning Disgrace, I found the Age of Iron. This is a moving internal first-person narrative of a cancer victim's final days, filled with graceful and disturbing reflections on a life lived and a death to come. Into the narrative come bursting the untidy eruptions of South Africa in the 1980's--township riots, the anger of blacks finally boiling to the surface, dead children martyred by the state, and homeless alcoholics--driving the tale far beyond a simple exegesis on life and death.Once again, I discovered a disquieting novel written from within the cramped point of view of a protagonist who knows better but cannot seem to gain the courage or momentum to change how she or he relates to the world. And, once again, I was bowled over by the quiet and simple prose that hurtled the narrative to the end.Coetzee's protagonists are deeply flawed--the attraction of the novel is to see if they find a state of grace or even understanding by the end. They can see the corruption in the world around them, can dispassionately view their own weaknesses as well. But they lack the clarity, or perhaps the courage, to act on what they see and know. Will they learn to act? That is the mystery that drives us to read with them.The narrator, an old, dying woman, a former college professor, becomes one of the few white civilians to experience the Township riots. She sees black teenagers she has known since childhood shot and killed--even one who is murdered in her own home. Yet she does nothing except write a long letter to her daughter (it is sometimes so longwinded that you wish she would move on already!). She contemplates self-immolation as a protest, but this goes nowhere. And, yet, she will not take the road of her daughter, who fled the horror of South Africa for a middle class life in the United States. It is as if her mere outraged presence is enough to subtly influence the white regime to be humane. In this, she is like so many other white South Africans of the 1980's (and probably like so many white Americans of the 1950's and Israeli's of the 1990's). She finds, brutally, horrifically, that her outrage has no influence. Even when she confronts the police/military in her own home, after they have murdered a teen in her backyard, they do not feign innocence to her--they understand her outrage but could care less.Like Disgrace, this is a lyrical novel that works on so many levels at once. It would be much less interesting if solely written about a dying woman; so much more polemic if written solely about the injustice of South Africa. Like the unseen daughter who may get the letter (if the very real Angel of Death in the novel delivers it), we can only read in mute anger and horror at the neutered conscience of white South Africa, frozen in its middle class lifestyle, afraid to look at the past or to contemplate the future, hoping it is all a bad dream and will all go away in the light of day. And, of co

This is the third book written by Coetzee I have read (his two booker prize winners being the other two). This, like those, is nearly flawless. I have encountered no other living Author ('A' deliberate) so capable of revealing thruths and emotions. His writing is alternately a scourge and a bandage. He lays your bare before him and then sews you up again. Age of Iron is obviously a book very close to his heart. It is dedicated to three deceased relatives, and was written during the Apartheid Riots in the late 1980's. This novel is required reading for persons of conscience and intellect. Coetzee is probably the greatest living novelist. Carey, Unsworth, whomever you compare him to, his mastery of language and ideas is overwhelming.

age of iron is a quietly tragic retelling of an elderly woman's final days, superimposed on an account of the deadly social turmoil in south africa in the late 80's. when the central character arrives to her home after learning of her condition, she discovers a homeless man sleeping between her house and that of her neighbors. is the man a symbol, a delivering angel? and if so, why has he come in this form, with his smell of whiskey and urine, his yellowing eyes, his contempt for her charity? in a parallel narrative, her own response to the chaos around her is a fitting commentary on white apathy: after two black children are attacked by police, her first impulse is to arm herself with a pen and paper and write a letter to her newspaper. and when she finds herself in the middle of a veritable battlefield, she can only mutter the words "i want to go home." this is book is coetzee's finest achievement, and may be his most overlooked.