A Man with the Music of All Seasons - J.M. Coetzee

There is music in writing. The greatest of writers capture it, wrestle and shape the form, and transmit it undiminished to our ears, bearing the full symphony of emotion which may be evoked.

Two seminal American novelist come immediately to mind; the blues, jazz-infused and soulful surging of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison sings throughout their work, shifting and weaving within the unfolding stories and the lives of the characters who are the denizens of those worlds, which are all microcosms of our own. The sad refrains, the joyous abandon, the temerity and the trepidation cantillate on in the voice of others: the canorous oeuvres of Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Achmat Dangor and Vikram Seth ply us with universal compositional mastery which partakes of the particular but never relinquishes the catholic quality of human understanding and expression.

And then one happens on the deft mandarins of the art. These wizards of air, water, earth and fire direct with subtle flourishes so delicate that they nearly escape the unrefined ear suffused with the cacophony of the witless and the unoriginal. One almost must strain to hear the dulcet tones they produce with rudimentary instruments, like wisps of the sea's orchestra emanating from shells which only hint at its power and majesty.

J.M. Coetzee is of this order of high mages. His work is lyrical from the initial, inculcating paragraph to the final trilling sigh of the remaining period. No matter the subject it rings of a classical gamelan, bridging the remnants of Western, African and Oriental cultures; banding together the disparate elements into a mettlesome chorus alternating between the susurrations of solitary reflection to the roaring onslaught of common brotherhood to the despondency of people blinded by personal rosaries they chant to themselves.

His novel Disgrace is so melodious that it is Shakespearean in lilt, gentle but persistent, compact but emotionally exhaustive. Its sheer capacity for reflection and similitude of an act performed by its protagonist with the correlation of equivalent acts of others from which this protagonist suffers, reaffirms that station in life is meaningless in the heady halls of human experience.

Timeliness, or rather timelessness, flows from his art. In Waiting for the Barbarians, an early novel, Coetzee creates a tale of separation, distinction and counterdistinction. The necessary "other" which makes conquest a singular course with a singular mindset is shown to be simply the living fear of man, and the internal conflict of the magistrate pro-an-tagonist is the central harmony which flares to an ascending crescendo and reverberates throughout. The problem of offensive defense, like our topical, disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, is dealt with handily, and the beguiling euphonic harmony of his invocation is not lost even amidst the despair and misery empires bring to themselves with selfish expansion.