Michael Wood writes:

In Diary of a Bad Year an author, a South African writer living in Australia, who can’t be Coetzee because he is six years older and doesn’t appear to have won the Nobel Prize, and who must be Coetzee since he has written at least two of Coetzee’s books (a set of essays on censorship and Waiting for the Barbarians), brings the story up to date. After a reading in Canberra, he tells us, a journalist reported that ‘my novel Waiting for the Barbarians “emerged from the South Africa of the 1970s”,’ but he didn’t report what he went on to say, switching the terms as his novel already had, so that, as in Conrad, the true savages become the men at work imposing so-called civilisation on others. ‘I used to think that the people who created these laws that effectively suspended the rule of law were moral barbarians. Now I know they were just pioneers, ahead of their time.’ There is plenty more of this quietly savage tone in Diary of a Bad Year, and lots about the facility at Guantánamo Bay and ‘national shame’. ‘Dishonour is no respecter of fine distinctions. Dishonour descends upon one’s shoulders, and once it has descended no amount of clever pleading will dispel it.’

(LRB 4 October 2007)

Harvill | hardback 231 pp. |ISBN: 9781846551208