Customer Reviews

Age of Iron

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After finishing Coetzee's Booker-prize winning Disgrace, I found the Age of Iron. This is a moving internal first-person narrative of a cancer victim's final days, filled with graceful and disturbing reflections on a life lived and a death to come. Into the narrative come bursting the untidy eruptions of South Africa in the 1980's--township riots, the anger of blacks finally boiling to the surface, dead children martyred by the state, and homeless alcoholics--driving the tale far beyond a simple exegesis on life and death.

Once again, I discovered a disquieting novel written from within the cramped point of view of a protagonist who knows better but cannot seem to gain the courage or momentum to change how she or he relates to the world. And, once again, I was bowled over by the quiet and simple prose that hurtled the narrative to the end.

Coetzee's protagonists are deeply flawed--the attraction of the novel is to see if they find a state of grace or even understanding by the end. They can see the corruption in the world around them, can dispassionately view their own weaknesses as well. But they lack the clarity, or perhaps the courage, to act on what they see and know. Will they learn to act? That is the mystery that drives us to read with them.

The narrator, an old, dying woman, a former college professor, becomes one of the few white civilians to experience the Township riots. She sees black teenagers she has known since childhood shot and killed--even one who is murdered in her own home. Yet she does nothing except write a long letter to her daughter (it is sometimes so longwinded that you wish she would move on already!). She contemplates self-immolation as a protest, but this goes nowhere.

And, yet, she will not take the road of her daughter, who fled the horror of South Africa for a middle class life in the United States. It is as if her mere outraged presence is enough to subtly influence the white regime to be humane. In this, she is like so many other white South Africans of the 1980's (and probably like so many white Americans of the 1950's and Israeli's of the 1990's). She finds, brutally, horrifically, that her outrage has no influence. Even when she confronts the police/military in her own home, after they have murdered a teen in her backyard, they do not feign innocence to her--they understand her outrage but could care less.

Like Disgrace, this is a lyrical novel that works on so many levels at once. It would be much less interesting if solely written about a dying woman; so much more polemic if written solely about the injustice of South Africa.

Like the unseen daughter who may get the letter (if the very real Angel of Death in the novel delivers it), we can only read in mute anger and horror at the neutered conscience of white South Africa, frozen in its middle class lifestyle, afraid to look at the past or to contemplate the future, hoping it is all a bad dream and will all go away in the light of day. And, of course, it did not, could not. And, also of course, the Angel of Death will always win out, in the end, as mute and implacable as the machine of the state.

age of iron is a quietly tragic retelling of an elderly woman's final days, superimposed on an account of the deadly social turmoil in south africa in the late 80's. when the central character arrives to her home after learning of her condition, she discovers a homeless man sleeping between her house and that of her neighbors. is the man a symbol, a delivering angel? and if so, why has he come in this form, with his smell of whiskey and urine, his yellowing eyes, his contempt for her charity? in a parallel narrative, her own response to the chaos around her is a fitting commentary on white apathy: after two black children are attacked by police, her first impulse is to arm herself with a pen and paper and write a letter to her newspaper. and when she finds herself in the middle of a veritable battlefield, she can only mutter the words "i want to go home." this is book is coetzee's finest achievement, and may be his most overlooked.

This is the third book written by Coetzee I have read (his two booker prize winners being the other two). This, like those, is nearly flawless. I have encountered no other living Author ('A' deliberate) so capable of revealing thruths and emotions. His writing is alternately a scourge and a bandage. He lays your bare before him and then sews you up again.

Age of Iron is obviously a book very close to his heart. It is dedicated to three deceased relatives, and was written during the Apartheid Riots in the late 1980's. This novel is required reading for persons of conscience and intellect.

Coetzee is probably the greatest living novelist. Carey, Unsworth, whomever you compare him to, his mastery of language and ideas is overwhelming.

Interesting and non-obvious look at apartheid. This book raises questions such as: what responsibility does one have for the crimes of a government that have benefitted you - even if you find those crimes repulsive and didn't ask for them; what kind of future can a nation have when it's children have been so brutalized that they become brutalizors themselves. I also think, as my title implies, that this book really exposes the way a community can blind itself or be blinded by others, gov't, media, etc., to the carnage and horror taking place all around them. If you can believe that a South African would be blind to the inhumanity trangressing in their country, then it's not so hard to believe how people in less brutal situations can also not understand or believe what goes on in their community.

This book really takes us inside just how disconcerting life must be, must have been, within the waning years of Apartheid for those whites in South Africa who grew up with this horrendous system yet could not contemplate their lives with out it, even if they were not actively racist themselves. The female lead's, and Coetzee always astounds me with his writing from a female perspective (I wonder if actual females would agree), confusion in dealing with the later years of Apartheid allow us to view in sympathy those whites caught up in the system by circumstance while not ignoring the great tragedy that Apartheid was to the Black majority. It also sheds a light on the perception issues that we face in the United States across the racial divide.

As usual, we can trust Coetzee to deliver some brilliant insights on the human condition, most specifically as it related to South Africa during the last years of Apartheid. Here, however, I felt Coetzee's stiff, cold prose style and his inability to create rich and whole characters undermined the storytelling and left me wishing it held together a bit more tightly; as it is the characters feel very flat and the book loses its emotive force because of this. Still, it's definitely worth reading to get a sense of the reality of Apartheid and how a government can keep its own citizenry ignorant.

In a letter to her daughter in America, Mrs. Curren, the 70-ish narrator of the terrific AGE OF IRON, makes a gruesome disclosure: her Cape Town physician has just told her she has an incurable cancer and her time is short. Her letter, which is the AGE OF IRON, then declares: "The first task laid on me, from today: to resist the craving to share my death. Loving you, loving life, to forgive the living and take my leave without bitterness. To embrace death as my own, mine alone."

While this task may feel right to Mrs. Curren, its fulfillment is undermined by her cancer, which gradually asserts control. "The end comes galloping," she observes. "I had not reckoned that as one goes downhill one goes faster and faster." The fulfillment of this task is also foiled by the apartheid system of South Africa, which Coetzee presents as a form of political and societal cancer. Finally, her own nature makes such a calm and self-contained end impossible. "To be full enough to give and to give from one's fullness: what deeper urge is there? Out of their withered bodies even the old try to squeeze one last drop."

These elements--cancer, apartheid, and Mrs. Curren's giving and communicative nature--combine to create a tense and brutal story, in which Mrs. Curren, who is isolated on principle, develops a strange yet appropriate accommodation to her impending death. In doing so, she confronts her cancer and the cancer of her country, while finding comfort in the company of an alcoholic vagrant, who embodies both malfunctioning South Africa and the shortcomings of willed obliviousness. Sounds weird... but it works.

As with most elements of this layered novel, the expression "age of iron" has multiple meanings. Initially, it is a reference to the ideologies of both defiant black Africans and the brutal Afrikaner government, who Mrs. Curren considers the "dogmatists and witch-hunters of both armies." But eventually, the expression also describes South Africans like Mrs. Curren and her daughter, who take small and private but obdurate steps in reaction to the shame they feel about the government and apartheid.

AGE OF IRON is a superior novel and allegory. And those who enjoy action writing may choose to reread the amazing Chapter Three, where a police action in a black township challenges Mrs. Curren's lifelong habits of mind.

Highly recommended.

In this novel first published in 1990, Mr Coetzee gives the grim account of both a human being facing imminent death and a country - South Africa - still immersed in the tragedy of the apartheid regime. Mrs Curren, a professor of classics in Cape Town, has just received the fatal news from her doctor, Dr Syfert, that she suffers from an incurable form of cancer. Part of the narrative consists in an imaginary letter Mrs Curren will never write to her daughter who left for America in 1976. Indeed she does not consider it to be just to share her burden with her daughter but, as she puts it, "to resist the craving to share my death", "to take my leave without bitterness" and "to embrace death as my own, mine alone." But since it is nearly impossible for her to approach death without the support of another human being, she ends up sharing her thoughts and life with Mr Vercueil, a tramp she finds one morning sleeping in the garden of her house.

Death is omnipresent in Mr Coetzee's work, not only Mrs Curren's but in the townships of Cape Town where the lives of the coloureds are worth next to nothing and therefore death is as common as life for the people obliged to live there. A powerful, sad and unforgettable tale whose characters and events cut to the bone.

I am a huge fan of Coetzee and have read four of his novels and two of his books on literary criticism. Age of Iron is an exceptional novel. It is written from the perspective of an elderly college professor, a teacher of the classics, who is dying from cancer. She is relating events to her daughter who left South Africa years ago to escape the injustices of the society that supported apartheid. As a dying observer, she experiences the terrors of the injustice such a system spans, and weaves a tale that integrates these large universal human themes into her personal loss of life. Due to her intelligent empathy she understands both the oppressed and the oppressor. There are multiple themes explored in the novel including comparison of the heroic, active, angry young willing to risk life and the reflective, analytic, seasoned wise observer who knows how precious human life is. This contrast is much of the armature on which the novel is built but the exploration of the feeling of shame in the elderly woman's heart is sublime. Why would a college professor who hates apartheid feel shame? Coetzee explores this question and conveys that shame is a feeling that one is off the moral course that honor has been lost, and thus the same she feels is a societal shame, the feeling that society has driven off course. This sense of shame evokes thought of self-immolation.

She experiences some of these injustices, including the death of a black adolescent in her home. She is not lacking in courage or passive, for she fearlessly confronts white security forces and police with her shaming voice. She sees how racial injustice can become state policy and those that hold up state policy can act in inhuman ways because they are just following instructions. She appeals to angry blacks, particularly the young, to not react in anger for it feeds the forces of repression. But she is the reflective encountering the heroic and her words fall on deaf ears.

Coetzee's narrative style is varied with poetic economy juxtaposed to philosophical musings, with clipped minimal dialogue contrasted with thoughtful personal encounters of those with contrasting aims and aspirations. There are wonderful references to the mythologies of classical antiquity throughout the novel. The homeless man who appears in her alley on the day she is diagnosed with terminal cancer is a wonderful reference to the death angel or to Hermes as he escorts her to the afterlife. There is even a dog guarding the gates of death.

This is a vastly ambitious novel and it succeeds grandly.

This book is about the personal struggles that several individuals endure in South Africa during the most brutal years of the Apartheid. The title of the book reflects the unyielding oppression and brutality of that dehumanizing regime. Indeed, such is the depth of dehumanization during this time, that all human interactions are depicted as being stripped of any form of kindness and generosity. This holds equally for the oppressors as it does for their victims, and all those caught in the middle of the various highly antagonistic groups.

The main character is a white woman who is battling the advanced stages of cancer. Alone in her misery, the woman often reflects on her only daughter who has managed to escape from South Africa in pursuit of a more normal life in the United States. Both the cancer and the absent daughter work as powerful, albeit too obvious, metaphors for the sickness of society and all of its social ills. The narrative is oftentimes very lyrical, and at some level functions like that of a very long prose poem. The reflections and monologues that are present throughout the book are of high literary value, though come off as overbearing after a while. I feel that the message of the book could have been conveyed much more effectively if Coetzee had focused on the main events of the story in a more dispassionate and matter of fact way. After all, the dehumanizing effects of the Apartheid speak for themselves.