Malignancies

By Jill Smolowe

AGE OF IRON by J.M. Coetzee

Random House; 198 pages; $18.95

At the heart of J.M. Coetzee's disturbing new novel is the stark image of cancer, a malignant disease that takes little pity on its victim as it ravages and destroys. The narrator of the tale is Mrs. Curren, a white South African widow of the liberal variety who is being eaten from within by a cancer she knows will shortly end her life. Her physical pain and advanced years entitle her to live out her final days in a quiet, dignified fashion. But circumstances conspire against graceful surrender. Separated by an ocean from her only child, she has no one to provide the solace and daughterly ministrations she longs for. At the same time, she is forced to contend with the racial cancer that is eating the society that surrounds her, stripping even its youngest members of their capacity to care, feel or abide by the most basic rules of human decency.

On the day Mrs. Curren returns from her doctor's office with news confirming her death sentence, she finds in her yard Vercueil, a foul-smelling vagrant who lives off his wits and other people's garbage. Together they forge an unexpected friendship that provides them both with the only breath of kindness in a world that has forsaken its humanity. First, however, they must surmount their differences. Mrs. Curren is determined to fight to the last, trying to stamp out South Africa's proliferating injustices; Vercueil wants only to disappear into his cardboard shack without responsibility to anyone or anything.

But as in Coetzee's earlier works -- most notably Waiting for the Barbarians and Life & Times of Michael K -- the author designs fictional landscapes where no one evades the tyranny of a system that pits white against black and young against old; everyone is forced to take sides. A central event involves the murder of Bheki, 15, a youth who could have been sired by any of today's black townships. Just days before, Mrs. Curren watched helplessly as Bheki taunted and beat the drunken Vercueil. "How will they treat their own children?" she scolds Florence, her maid and Bheki's mother. "What love will they be capable of?" "They are good children," Florence responds without apology. "They are like iron, we are proud of them."

Coetzee is not so forgiving. In his sharply drawn Age of Iron, black parents who refuse to instill in their children a respect for the sanctity of life are as responsible as the ruthless police and indifferent whites for spawning youths who "start by being careless of their own lives and end by being careless of everyone else's."

Coetzee is at his most surefooted when he crisply narrates events, letting the horror speak for itself. Too often, however, he seems not to trust the reader, stating and restating his distress. The story is also gilded with tedious descriptions of Mrs. Curren's longing for her daughter, which rely on cliches such as "the blood tug of daughter to mother, woman to woman."

Still, the tale brings home Coetzee's acute warning that black comradeship is "nothing but a mystique of death, of killing and dying." Early in the book, Mrs. Curren tells Florence, "You are showing Bheki and his friends that they can raise their hands against their elders with impunity." When Mrs. Curren later collapses in the street, only to be indifferently probed by three small children in search of money and gold teeth, readers finally taste the iron for themselves.