It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and launch himself across the void. What if I fall?— that is what he asks himself. What if I fall and then keep falling for ever? Lying in bed in the middle of the night, I could sometimes swear that I too was falling — falling under the same spell that grips the boy. If getting from one to two is so hard, I asked myself, how shall I ever get from zero to one? From nowhere to somewhere: it seemed to demand a miracle each time.The first thing you need to know about The Childhood of Jesus is that it contains no character named “Jesus”: there may be loaves and fishes, a wish for the dead to rise again, and a virgin mother, but without a Jesus, you can assume it's all one big allegory, and if like me you don't get the allusions, it's a head-scratcher of a book that doesn't satisfy on its own straightforward reading. The other thing you need to know is that J. M. Coetzee is probably a literary genius, and as such, he likely doesn't care a bit if I, an average reader, can follow along.
The book opens as a man and a young boy arrive in a strange land as refugees and seek shelter and information at the Centro de Reubicación Novilla. We learn the man's name is Simón, and on their ocean crossing, he assumed responsibility for the boy, David, when the youngster became separated from his mother. Repeatedly, Simón must stress, “Not my grandson, not my son, but I am responsible for him.” (And does this have something to do with Simon Peter's denial of Jesus after his arrest? The title urges the reader to look for such biblical connections throughout.) In this new country, everyone has been brought from away, somehow had their memories erased, have been assigned new names and presumed ages, and all are compelled to speak to one another in beginner's Spanish. At every turn, Simón is surprised at how helpful everyone is, yet also shocked by how dispassionate they are: helpfulness is based on a common sense of “goodwill”, but there is so little actual empathy that Simón and David are forced to sleep in the yard of an employee from the Centre on their first night, given nothing but bread and water for their dinner, encouraged to attend to their bathroom needs in the bushes.
The town of Novilla seems to be some kind of Socialist Utopia (and a Spanish one at that, with a little boy named Fidel and a dog named Bolivar), where Simón and the boy are assigned basic accommodations in an apartment block, money is easy to come by but there is very little to buy, and Simón easily finds employment as a stevedore at the docks – a physically demanding job for which he is unsuited, but the goodwill of his fellow employees is such that no one minds if he can't shoulder as many sacks as everyone else: the goal is to work for its own sake and take pride in receiving a pay packet at the end of the week. Unlike those around him who seem to accept the culture of this strange land, Simón senses that things are missing:
It is true: I have no memories. But images still persist, shades of images. How that is I can't explain. Something deeper persists too, which I call the memory of having a memory.Simón doesn't understand why everyone is content with bread and water (Man cannot live by bread alone), or why he's the only one who seems to suffer from sexual desire, or why no one eats meat or uses spices or questions the point of a gang of men emptying the holds of ships, day after back-breaking day, when a crane would be more efficient. Simón attempts to engage his coworkers in a philosophical discussion about the nature of work, arguing that history itself demands the evolution from manual labour to mechanised, saying:
Like you I crossed the ocean. Like you I bring no history with me. What history I had I left behind. I am simply a new man in a new land, and that is a good thing. But I have not let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas can not be washed out of us, not even by time. Ideas are everywhere. The universe is instinct with them. Without them there would be no universe, for there would be no being.Obviously, Simón believes that he is challenging the others' thinking, but at this speech, the foreman invokes “The spirit of the angora”, asking if someone has a response to this. A younger man steps forward and speaks eloquently on the nature of reality, concluding, “'Which of us has ever had his cap blown off by history?' There is silence. 'No one. Because history has no manifestations. Because history is not real. Because history is just a made up story...History is merely a pattern we see in what has passed. It has no power to reach into the present.'” (It is revealed later that there is an Institute in Novilla where the citizens can take free courses and this young man studies Philosophy – yet when Simón attends a seminar he leaves in disgust because the lecture is on the chairness of chairs and the tableness of tables.)
Meanwhile, Simón believes that his purpose in Novilla is to reunite David with his mother (although neither of them would recognise her, neither even knows her name), and based on his feeling that he would simply know her to see her, Simón offers the boy to the first woman, Inés, that feels right. Simón installs Inés in his own apartment with the boy (where she infantalises the five year old by powdering his bum, installing a crib, and pushing him around in a stroller), and Simón takes on the role of godfather, trying to teach the boy to read from a child's abridged version of Don Quixote. (And here is an academic essay on Coetzee's use of Cervantes throughout his writing, and especially as it relates to Borges; which, with the Spanish Socialist Republic seen here, seems particularly relevant.) Because David seems confused about whether or not Don Quixote is actually battling giants or tilting at windmills, Simón explains that it can be read either way; from either Quixote's fantastical or Sancho's literal perspective (which seems a clue to reading this book?). But when David tries to make up his own stories based on the pictures instead of actually learning to read, Simón proclaims, “For real reading you have to submit to what is written on the page. You have to give up your own fantasies. You have to stop being silly. You have to stop being a baby.” (Which seems a clue to reading this book?)
When David turns six, they are forced to send him to school, but his refusal to learn to read and his “philosophical problems” with numbers tags the boy as a problematic student who would do better at a reform school. When Simón discovers that David can indeed read and brings him back to the school to show his teacher, the teacher is annoyed to have been tricked. When commanded by his teacher to write out the phrase, “Conviene que yo diga la verdad, I must tell the truth”, David instead writes, “Yo soy la verdad, I am the truth.” And this is why the teacher finds the boy unteachable: David has spent all of his schooldays being likewise mysterious and defiant. In order to avoid sending David to reform school, Simón and Inés escape with the boy from Novilla (a flight into Egypt perhaps?), and as they drive along, David encourages everyone they meet to join them in their new life; gathering disciples, as it were. The end.
In reading other reviews for The Childhood of Jesus, I see people mentioning all the great philosophers (from Plato to Dante to Voltaire) that are invoked by this book, and I suppose I would have gotten more from it if I recognised the references. I believe I got most of the Biblical allusions, but that only serves to highlight how weird this book reads as an interpretation of “the childhood of Jesus”: the spoiled and bratty David hardly seems like the Christchild, meek and mild. I picked this book up because the 2016 Man Booker Prize longlist was released this week and Coetzee's The Schooldays of Jesus has been nominated – as that book is the sequel to this one, I hope to at least have gained some scant basis for understanding it (when it is finally released in October). This book went over my head, and while I wish I could give it four or five stars and rave above what a genius literary work it is, that would be a lie: to my undereducated and unitiated sensibilities, it was just all right.
