Trinity trilogy
Novel has more questions than answers
The Death of Jesus J.M. Coetzee Viking
Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s latest work is the third and presumably final novel in a series that freely adapts the Christian Nativity story, relocating it to an unnamed, Spanish-speaking country that may or may not be a vision of the afterlife.
Newcomers arrive by ship “washed clean” of their memories and previous lives. They are processed through a resettlement camp, where they are assigned names and ages. The first book, The Childhood of Jesus, describes how a man named Simón assumes responsibility for an apparently orphaned child named David. Together they search for a mother for the boy until they find a woman, Inés, willing to embrace that role.
Simón is dependable, prudent and reflective but seemingly without passion or imagination. Inés comes across as a fussy nag, devoted to David, but lacking an interior life.
Joined in a sexless union, they do their best to raise the precocious, headstrong and frequently insufferable child. When David’s teachers threaten to place him in a “special school,” for insubordinate children, the family flees to the provincial city of Estrella. A second novel gives us The Schooldays of Jesus.
The new novel, The Death of Jesus, takes place about two years later. David, now 10, comes down with a mystery disease and is taken to hospital. A vigil ensues, the outcome of which — spoiler alert — is telegraphed by the novel’s title.
In the hospital, David is briefly reunited with Dmitri, who claims David imparted “a message” to him before dying. But, in a letter to Simón, Dmitri admits, “the content of the message is still obscure. … David himself may have been the message.”
The message of Coetzee’s trilogy is similarly inscrutable. The books sit in a zone between allegory and parable, refuting interpretation. The plots are perfunctory, only occasionally generating moments of suspense. Lengthy passages in all three volumes are given over to often inconclusive philosophical discussions.
Most of these exchanges revolve around questions of morality, mortality and metaphysics. While most of Estrella’s residents seem content to live unexamined lives, Simón, David and Dmitri share a relentless inquisitiveness that is at odds with the grey-scale utopia where they reside. One can’t shake the feeling that Coetzee, in these novels, is perpetrating some kind of practical joke on his readers, a joke that only the author really gets.