The Life and Times of Michael K.

J.M. Coetzee has won two Booker Prizes, the first of them in 1983 for his parable The Life and Times of Michael K., a bleak, opaque novel that seems to draw from Kafka’s The Trial while also influencing Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road. The novel was Coetzee’s immediate follow-up to Waiting for the Barbarians, another fable that also puts its main character through the ringer to make larger humanist points, although Michael K.‘s target, the apartheid system of South Africa at the time, seems more overt than that of Barbarians.

Michael K. is the main character, a somewhat simple man, born with a cleft lip and abandoned by his mother to an institution for most of his life, although when her health begins to fail she reconnects with him for entirely selfish purposes. They live in Cape Town, where he has a job as a gardener and she has one as a domestic servant, but when her health slips further and the country devolves into civil war, she asks him to bring her back to the town of her birth so she can die there. Stymied by a faceless bureaucracy that won’t issue him the permits required to leave the city, Michael builds a rickshaw to carry his mother to the countryside, but she dies before they reach their destination, which sets Michael on a perverse series of adventures that find him living off the land as a hermit, impressed into two different labor camps, accused of aiding rebel forces by growing vegetables for them, and eventually in a hospital where one kind doctor takes an interest in him just as he seems to have given up on living.

I compared Waiting for the Barbarians to the writing of fabulist Italo Calvino, and Michael K. has the same atmosphere, one of watching the action in the story at a greater remove, so that even where Coetzee provides detail on Michael’s surroundings – in the camps, for example, or when Michael plants sees to grow pumpkins and other winter crops while he’s living on his own in the valley – there’s a sense of distance and opacity throughout the text. Michael is an unknowable character, not a cipher to the reader but a man without definition even to himself, and thus his interactions with others – government forces, mostly, but occasionally residents of the towns through which he passes or other people in the labor camps – all have an amorphous tenor to them, as if Coetzee passed them through a filter before presenting them to the reader.

Coetzee is South African by birth and he implies that the civil war in the novel is between the white authorities, who still enforced the apartheid policy to subjugate the country’s black majority at the time of the book’s publication, and rebel forces that included people of color and those sympathetic to them. Most characters are not identified by race, although Michael is identified as “colored” early in the book, which would put him at immediate odds with the racialist white soldiers he meets. Yet beneath the theme of racial animus is a strong streak of individualist philosophy – Michael is happiest, if you could call it that, when he is living off the land, supporting himself, living daily with the simple purpose of sustaining himself, with no contact with others.

The Kafka parallel is perhaps a little too overt here. Michael K. has the same sort of experiences with intransigent, oblique authority figures, from the bureaucrats who won’t give him the permit to leave the city and then give him circular explanations for why to the soldiers and officers at the labor camp who explain that he can’t leave but he’s not a prisoner. His name is such an obvious nod to The Trial, and his experiences in the camps mirror those of Josef K. in detention, so that the result is too on the nose. (Wikipedia says Coetzee was also influenced by a German novel, Michael Kohlhaas, but I’m unfamiliar with it.)

Waiting for the Barbarians was bleak, and often more graphic, but I found I connected to both the protagonist and the themes of the novel more than I did to The Life and Times of Michael K., where Coetzee keeps the reader one degree farther away from the material. I can understand why it was honored and is still regarded as a great novel, but its literary merit far exceeds its accessibility.

Next up: Still reading Anna Burns’ Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Brize.