BOOK REVIEW - The Childhood of Jesus by J.M.Coetzee

This mysterious novel follows the story of a young boy of unknown parentage given the name David by the officers of a state-run reception centre in an unnamed but Spanish speaking country. We first meet David when he arrives on a boat accompanied by a man given the name Simon, who seems to feel a connection with the boy and takes it upon himself to act as his guardian and begin the search for his mother, who is apparently already living there.

The title of the novel encourages the reader to try to find connections with the childhood of Jesus - which are not immediately obvious, if they exist at all. David and Simon’s first night in the new country - perhaps a reference to the nativity - is spent in a make-shift bed in the back yard of the house of one of the workers at the reception centre who takes pity on them - but is not sympathetic enough to allow them to sleep indoors.

Unfortunately David’s identity papers and his mother’s address were lost on the boat trip and, with no help from the state authorities, Simon begins to search for David’s mother using gut instinct alone.

Simon is given a flat in a state owned apartment block and a job at the city docks, lugging sacks of grain from container ships which are transported by horse and cart to a store before being turned into bread for the city. At night the dock workers attend philosophy classes at the city Institute, but the philosophy that is taught is not to Simon’s taste - pastimes here are as bland as the food, the work and the housing. He makes friends with a single mother called Elena and her son Fidel becomes friendly with David. David seems the only thing of real interest to Simon. The only colour in a grey world.

Simon repeatedly questions whether it is appropriate for him to bring up David alone, reminding himself and everyone he meets that he is not his real father. Simon’s instincts lead them to a private apartment complex called La Residencia, where, from the other side of the fence, they glimpse a young woman playing tennis with her brothers. With no evidence but without a second thought, Simon identifies Ines as David’s mother and convinces her to leave her plush surroundings and take over care of the boy, living in the flat that Simon gifts to her - an action which Elena can not understand and advises against. “All great gifts come out of knowhere” Simon reflects later.

David is a gifted child who seems to have been born knowing how to read and write but often writes in an unknown script and interprets language and numbers in an abstract, other-worldly way which, like many other aspects of his story, is never fully explained. He (like Ines) is resistant to formal schooling but is eventually enrolled.

A lecherous pseudo-devil figure called Senor Daga lives nearby and tempts David with ice-cream and the promise that he will give Ines David’s much wished for two brothers; the relationship between Ines and Daga is not described in detail. When questioned about their relationship to the child, Ines explains that she and Simon are the “family of David.”

Throughout the book David questions Simon about the way the world works. An interesting exchange occurs when David asks what it is like to “fall”. “Is it like flying?” He asks? “Just for a little, when you are up high?”

After a few weeks, David finds himself at odds with the school authorities. His way of writing and of comprehending numbers is, he insists, the truth. The authorities determine he is an unstable influence on the other children and order him to attend a secure institution some miles from the city - not named Golgotha but Punto Arenas or ‘sandy point.’

David escapes from the school, wounded by the barbed wire fence and Ines decides they should flee, with Simon in tow. The last few chapters of the book describe their journey, during which David invites those he meets to join them;

“We are going to the new life. Will you come with us to the new life?”

This novel, by the South African born Nobel Prize winning J.M.Coetzee ends as mysteriously as it begins.

In this snapshot of the life of a refugee boy and those whose lives are changed by coming into contact with him, the only references to the past are when Simon explains that the world is ‘as it always has been.’ Our attention is directed firmly to the present and the future.

Perhaps whether Coetzee imagined David as Jesus, Ines as Mary and Simon as Joseph or the Angel Gabriel or neither, his novel invites us all to look for resonances between the childhood of Jesus - unexplored in the Gospels - and the lives of others, or ourselves, in the here and now.