Age of Iron
By J.M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg
To acquire knowledge in the novels of J.M. Coetzee is often to acquire a choice of action and that choice, even if it is of inaction, is always a political one. Once an act of violence has been seen, it cannot be ignored—to forget is to express support for its perpetrator. To choose a side with the victim is never a heroic choice, or even a choice that carries unbearably painful consequences and often a complete change of circumstances; it is unappreciated, unasked for an necessary. Necessary because knowledge is never just an oppressive act or system, but also of one’s own complicity with it.
In Age of Iron, Coetzee’s latest novel, the author examines the way violent political repression implicates all aspects of all private life. Nothing in such a regime can be exempt from its systematic violence and destruction; to thin oneself separate is to be blind to one’s actual situation. Age of Iron is the story of a good person in “times when to be a good person is not enough.” The novel is written as a letter from Elizabeth Curran, an older woman dying of cancer, that is to be mailed to her daughter in America when she is dead. She starts at the day she is told that her disease is terminal, and she begins by using the disintegration she perceives around her — the general condition of violence and danger, the growing numbers of the homeless and roving gangs, the tramp she finds on her doorstep, the dilapidated condition of her house — to describe and reflect the cancer inside her. However, as she explains her surroundings to provide material, her narrative starts to change its focus. Everything she describes is fragmented and a bitter parody of what a good person wants to see, from the very personal through to the whole social structure. Her body is torn apart by cancer, an invasive, alienating thing which she imagines as a perverse baby that won’t be born. Her family is separated: of her husband she says only that they separated and he died; her only child is in America and has sworn not to return until the system has changed.
Curren’s household seems to consist of elements brought together more by chance than design, including the tramp who moves in at the start of the novel, her domestic Florence, Florence’s two daughters, her son and his friend. This household is comprised of strange and silent alliances and enmities, random acts of violence and humiliation erupt without warning, people die or disappear suddenly, and the house is open to violation and invasion from without. It holds no sanctuary and offers no united front.
Out on the streets a larger picture of the same situation looms; vague images of unspecified threat from roving gangs and wandering dangers mix with specific incidents delineating the divorce of institutions from their functions: police do not protect, but victimize; ambulance drivers do not try to save lives. Men that the protagonist sees fighting a fire that rages through a shantytown turn out to be feeding the flames. This is all played out against the broader landscape of South Africa, a country warring on itself.
As Elizabeth Curren describes a world of savage random brutality, horrifying deaths, ceaseless spirals of internecine strife, impotence, alienation, and despair, she comes to fit her cancer into what she describes. It is a shame, and more, the inheritance of a crime committed a long time ago, committed in her name, a crime that she is part of and that is part of her. No longer does she see her disease as special, distancing her from her surroundings. Instead she understands it as the inevitable realization of those surroundings inside herself.
At the start of the novel the protagonist longs to be able to return again to childhood, to have a mother tell her it will be all right. By the end of the novel an adult attainment of a state of childhood is reflected in the willed blindness of those who will not see what goes on around them. This state is not innocent, but ignorant, and pertains mainly to adults — all the children portrayed in the novel respond directly to the violence that controls their world, preparing themselves to perpetuate it in some way as soon as possible. The novel laments the loss of the idea of childhood as innocence, an idea which Curren realizes has no meaning here. To see, in this novel, is to open your eyes and know that you are impotent in an unbearably painful world, to be confronted with choices that offer no comfort or escape from being implicated in the systematic brutality of apartheid. Childhood as ignorance is a metaphor for the time before the eyes have opened, not a metaphor for a time when pain did not exist.
Age of Iron is deeply moral, without being moralistic, bitingly painful without being sentimental, and despairing without being cynical. In elegant, sparing, and poetic prose Coetzee depicts hell.
