I am coming to this book a quarter of a century after it won the Booker Prize in 1999. Heaven knows how many years this relatively slim volume has been in my boxes, carried around from house move to house move, intended to be read. But this is a book that keeps well. Its themes of morality, regret, sorrows, resonate well today as they did when it was written. A Penguin review by Sam Parker in 2020 argues this novel was telling us things before we were ready to listen, so perhaps it is well I came to this reading late, where it finds such ready resonances in our current times.
Set in South Africa, the plot goes that Professor Lurie, a professor of English studies, specialising in the Romantics and Byron, falls into disgrace at his university, hence the title. David Lurie has had 2 marriages and 2 divorces and any number of casual affairs, and indeed, the start of the book depicts him having a long-standing agreement with a prostitute. Chronic womaniser, Lurie seduces a very beautiful student, Melanie Issacs, is reported for it, and is disciplined by being forced to resign.
Lurie refuses to show remorse, and instead argues that as he accepts culpability and pleads guilty, he is not obliged to demonstrate remorse, because that is a personal and private matter, and that remorse is irrelevant to the issue. In the university inquiry, Lurie says he accepts all the charges, and when pressed to say more to save himself, he mockingly tells the committee,
Suffice it to say that Eros entered. After that I was not the same. … I was not myself, I was no longer a fifty-year-old divorce at a loose end. I became a servant of Eros (p52).
When advised not to sneer at colleagues trying to save him from himself and then pressed for contrition and sincerity, he retorts,
I have said the words for you, now you want more, you want me to demonstrate their sincerity. That is preposterous. That is beyond the scope of the law (p55).
The novel is very finely written, sharing a lot of how Lurie thinks, but not giving the reader full access to Lurie’s mind and motivations. Lurie is a wonderfully complex and contrary character, combining great self-awareness with great lack of self-awareness.
Lurie decides to temporarily leave Cape Town, where he has seemingly become a pariah since his fall from grace. He goes to stay with his daughter, Lucy, on her small holding on the Eastern Cape. He knows the country life is not for him, but it is a sort of refuge for a time. Another ethical dilemma arises when his daughter is attacked and raped while he is locked into the bathroom and set on fire by three assailants who are not exactly strangers, and the attack was not random. Nor was burglary the main aim; in fact, the burglary was incidental, the rape and assault was the intention, and this was supposed to send a clear message to the victim. The assailants are black men, and known to Lucy’s neighbour, a black man who wants to take over ownership of Lucy’s land.
Lucy does not want to report the rape or have the guilty men caught and charged. When Lurie presses her, she says she thinks they may even come back for her again, and broods,
what if that is the price one has to pay for staying on? Perhaps that is how they look at it; perhaps that is how I should look at it too. They see me as owing something. They see themselves as debt collectors, tax collectors. Why should I be allowed to live here without paying? Perhaps that is what they tell themselves (p158)
Lurie is dismayed at what he perceives as his daughter’s misplaced guilt, but not wanting to risk alienating her, he does not press her too hard.
In the story, Lurie learns that his original assumptions and indeed, moralities and principles, need to be rethought. The events that overtake him after his resignation from the university force him to confront his own stances, and learn to be a new kind of person, however disinclined he knows himself to be. He understands he is much reduced, but he will not allow himself to be dismissed entirely. It is a novel about disempowerment, about exploitation, about abuses of power, underpinned always by racial and sexual tensions. It is also a novel about conflict, political and external, as well as domestic, familial, and internal. It is a powerful piece of writing, handled with a light deftness which accentuates the issues rather than glossing over them.
~ Disgrace, by J.M.Coetzee ~ Secker and Warburg, 1999.
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