Review: Disgrace by JM Coetzee

I need to give credit where credit is due, because this book is generally very well written. However, while many seem to be able to move past their distaste for David Lurie, the main character, I found him endlessly tiring.

David Lurie is a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, pretentious, creepy, manipulative rapist. He is a white middle-aged man in post-Apartheid South Africa, a professor who considers himself better than nearly everyone around him, treats women with contempt, and uses his deluded perception of himself as a student of romantic poetry and "a servant of Eros" as an excuse for his behaviour. After two failed marriages he regularly manipulates attractive tourists or the occasional co-worker into sleeping with him between his weekly visits to a prostitute (that is, until he stalks her and her family, causing her to flee in fear).

He is ultimately fired after raping a student, a rape which both Lure and the reader are meant to see as blurred but as in individual who considers herself a believer in the concept of consent, it is very clearly rape. After Lurie's "disgrace" he goes to live with his daughter, Lucy, on the farm deep in the countryside that she has been living on for several years.

The book seems to try to point the reader towards several different conclusions regarding Lurie. In many senses he gets the karma coming to him from his past behaviour, he is meant to demonstrate glimpses of humanity through his distaste for the way animals are treated in the countryside, and he is meant to show the flawed nature of humanity, as he seems to learn very little through the events that unfold.

Despite this, I could not see beyond my disgust towards Lurie and thereby what Coetzee is trying to say didn't particularly resonate with me. I found Lurie tedious. I have to deal with so many self-important misogynistic middle-aged white men on a daily basis. Why would I want to read about one in my spare time? In some ways it was interesting to get into the head of one of these men but beyond that Lurie's thoughts and actions were tiresome.

Lucy was a far more interesting character and had potential to give greater insight than Lurie ever did. Through self-loathing she has elected to live in a way that is seemingly designed to punish her, living in an area dangerous for a young white woman surrounded by a community who clearly do not want here there, isolated from family, friends and her partner, poor, disempowered and oppressed. Why has she chosen to do this? Is it white guilt? Is she ashamed about being homosexual? The reader never finds out what has happened to her or why she hates herself to the degree that she chooses to live in a constant state of self-punishment. Coetzee failed to flesh her out beyond acting as a support cast member for the star of the show, Lurie.

Despite my lack of interest in Lurie, I did find the book more engrossing than I expected. I enjoyed the pace and style of the writing. However, I found the ending dissatisfying as it left more questions than answers about Lucy and I was ultimately completely apathetic towards Lurie's fate.