Coetzee’s subtle games with death

Mortality casts a long shadow over the Nobel laureate’s stories – but at 83 he’s as good as ever

272pp, Vintage, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£20, ebook £9.99

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The Pole starts on a classic Coetzeean chord: “1. The woman is the first to give him trouble, followed soon afterwards by the man.” Like most of Coetzee’s prose, it is plain, almost overdetermined in its precision. It is not enough that this be the novella’s first sentence: it also needs to be numbered as such, like the opening proposition in a logical treatise. Yet there is a strangeness to it. Trouble is being given, and unobtrusively but decisively, passed on to the reader too. You read on in the hope of resolving it, and in the knowledge that, as always with Coetzee, more trouble is on its way.

For those new to the work of the 2003 Nobel laureate, the brilliance of a sentence like this might not be evident. But Coetzee is a writer whose qualities are as profound as they are unshowy, and The Pole and Other Stories, a collection of one novella and five tales, finds him, at 83, as good as ever, pursuing the ethical and artistic questions that have animated his whole career. Despite its gathering work from as far back as 2004, this book feels unified, and has lateness written all over it.

Coetzee has always been concerned with death, but while his previous three books, the Jesus trilogy (2013-19), played out that concern in a metaphysical fable, here it takes on newfound solidity. In The Pole, death first enters as a joking sideways reference. The eponymous character, an aged outmoded pianist called Witold, looks just like Max von Sydow – the actor best known for playing chess against Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Witold acknowledges the resemblance with “the ghost of a smile”.

For her part, Beatriz, a middleaged but physically “striking” housewife who helps to organise small classical concerts in Barcelona, is set up as a kind of saviour