Diary For A New Age

Despite the fact that I'm swamped with work I'm fairly racing through Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. I expect to finish it tomorrow, and with some regret at that. It's just so readable, so thought-provoking that I know when I finally put it down I'll feel sorely in need of something equally stirring to keep me in touch with the side of life that really matters. I've found myself picking it up at every spare moment - and they've been few and far between just lately - not exactly to find out what happens next (in a sense, not much is happening at all) but to see where Coetzee is going to take me next.

I suppose it might be best characterised as a novel of ideas, and ideas of compelling relevance to the times in which we live - though you do get to care about the three characters the novel revolves around - but that makes it sound a lot drier than it is. Coetzee convinces you (well, me anyway) that the ideas he explores, and they really are explored from just about every possible angle, are urgent, indeed, demanding of our attention, and, in some sense, action. There's a moral seriousness here that's extraordinarily powerful and disturbing. As with Disgrace I think I'm going to put the text aside in some sense a changed person - I hope, in a small way, for the better.

And all this from a text that on the surface (each page divided into three segments, each segment containing its own little bit of sort of, but not always, narrative; in fact, predominantly the main 'narrative' consisting of expository pieces by the main character, a writer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Coetzee) looks like a bit of gimmicky post-modern tiresome fictive trickery. Good grief, the man's a magician.