A tale of political vs. religious faith

The Childhood of Jesus

By J.M. Coetzee

Viking. 288 pp. $26.95

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Reviewed by Helen W. Mallon

In The Childhood of Jesus, his 12th novel, J.M. Coetzee presents a moral challenge to the West: Given the tension between faith and politics, we who equate faith with "extremism" should take a good, hard look in the mirror.

It's a subtle tale about a hot-button topic: faith in a political system versus an essentially religious faith.

The novel opens with the arrival of a man and a 5-year-old boy on the shores of Novilla, a placid, "bloodless" utopia where the inhabitants, all former refugees, have been "washed clean" of memories of their former lives. They have been taught a new language (Spanish) and given new names. Adults and children alike are tabula rasa. Upon them the new culture stamps a fresh identity, the essence of which is to be content with less: That way, what is there to fight about? Newly arrived from a refugee camp, Simón and young David - whose names were once something else - are thrown together accidentally when on the boat the boy loses the papers identifying his parents.

Simón, who cares for David tenderly, is full of purpose. He is convinced he must find the boy's real mother. Even more, he believes that in this land of ineffectual bureaucracy, his "native intuition" will reveal who she is. "What else can we trust in?" he demands when a friend questions the danger of relying on this method. She insists, "If we all lived by our intuitions the world would fall into chaos."

It is tempting to be influenced by the book's title, and readers familiar with Christian mythology will find support for a subtext about a revolutionary in the making. Young David is precocious, brilliant but rebellious in school. He adores a library copy of Don Quixote, insisting that Don Quixote's view of the world is right and Sancho Panza's is wrong. At first, he is endearingly vulnerable and wide-eyed. He trusts Simón so completely that when his surrogate father feints at hitting David to prove the existence of a universal instinct for self-protection, the boy does not flinch.

When Simón, an unlikely angel of annunciation, finds his virgin, she is an indolent young woman named Inés who lives in a rundown resort with her two thuggish brothers. "It is not from the past that I recognize Inés but from elsewhere," he argues. "It is as if the image of her were embedded in me." Inés spends her days playing tennis, but like her saintly predecessor, she is initially troubled by the proposition that she not adopt David but "become" his mother. Surprisingly, she consents, imperiously asserting her will over that of her brothers. Inés moves into Simón's meager apartment, initially refusing him contact with David, while Simón squats in a shack by the docks.

Simón is alone in questioning Novilla's status quo. He is "troubled by memories," presumably of his previous life. His fellow stevedores, alongside whom he hauls massive sacks of grain from the hold of a ship, are kind and respectful. They listen to his opinions, but they are blandly, even weirdly, indifferent to his dissatisfaction with a plentiful diet of bread and canned beans. They are puzzled when he expresses a preference for emotional passion in relationships with women. If he fills out the correct paperwork and doesn't mind waiting, he'll be matched with a "therapist" to take care of his urges.

When Simón questions the futility of hauling grain sacks to molder in a rat-infested warehouse, his boss Álvaro says:

You would like to liberate us from a life of bestial labor. . . . You want us to quit the wharves and find some other kind of work . . . where we would lose touch with . . . the food that feeds us and gives us life. . . . Why are you so sure we need to be saved, Simón? It is the clever reasoning you rely on that is stupid . . . there is no place for cleverness here, only for the thing itself.

But what is "the thing itself"? Is it the iconic Inés ("holy"), of whom Simón thinks "in the name the essence"? Inés foolishly panders to David, while Simón, idealizing her unearned wisdom, acquiesces in spoiling him. This suggests an implied, if ambiguous, conclusion beyond the book's end, in which the three escape to the hills to avoid the authorities who insist that David attend a special, vaguely threatening, school for noncompliant children. David's metamorphosis from innocent admirer of Don Quixote to imperious manipulator of adults is horrifying.

Ultimately, the sympathetic Simón loses himself through loyalty to an unreliable vision. Yet the alternative is no better. In The Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee poses a dilemma whose resolution, if there is one, undoubtedly requires the courage to respect both sides.