Novel of the week The Schooldays of Jesus

Harvill Secker 272pp £17.99 The Week bookshop £14.99

J.M. Coetzee “is not interested in writing books for escapism and entertainment”, said Duncan White in The Daily Telegraph. In The Schooldays of Jesus, a sequel to The Childhood of Jesus (2013), he presents further instalments from his cryptic allegory about a boy and a man – Davíd and Simón – who form an unlikely alliance after meeting on a boat travelling to an unnamed, Spanish-speaking country. Many critics found the earlier novel “baffling”, and this one opens in a similar vein: in place of plot, there are lengthy “Socratic” dialogues about “what numbers are”, or the nature of “sexual intercourse”. After Davíd enrols at a dance school, there’s much discussion of the metaphysics of dance. But “just when you’re prepared to ditch all this nonsense”, a murder “brings the novel to life”. Coetzee – longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for the sixth time – once again “finds a way of denying you everything you want while somehow giving you what you need”.

This book doesn’t, as it happens, have anything much to do with Jesus, said Stig Abell in The Spectator. Coetzee is now so much part of the “literary pantheon” that he no longer needs to bother “having a title that makes sense”. But he should worry about “telling a story worth following”. Though the novel interrogates “thorny concepts” (truth, justice, criminal responsibility), it does so “at little depth” and in prose that is “doughtily uninspired”. I disagree, said David Sexton in the London Evening Standard: I found parts of this novel “almost too affecting to read without pausing to recover”. It may be Coetzee at his most “uninterpretable”, but it’s still full of “beauty” – and the work of a “master”.