J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel opens in slow motion as a 60-year-old cyclist, hit by a car, catapults through the air, crashes to the ground, then stretches out at peace and closes his eyes. Afterwards, the ill-starred Paul Rayment finds himself an amputee, doomed to a circumscribed life in his flat in Adelaide: “If you have hitherto been a man, with a man’s life, may you henceforth be a dog, with a dog’s life. That is what the voice says, the voice out of the dark cloud.”

To whom does this voice belong? None other than Elizabeth Costello, hero of Coetzee’s previous novel, an award-winning Australian-Irish-Catholic writer who calls herself “a secretary of the invisible” and may also be his alter-ego. At the end of Elizabeth Costello, in a Kafkaesque dream scene, she envisioned an old dog “scarred from innumerable manglings”, stretched out at the gate to the afterlife, resting with its eyes closed. One can’t resist the notion that Paul Rayment is this very dog, the subject who now “comes to her” without any prior history, just “a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion”.

In the first part of Slow Man, Elizabeth exists only as breath on Paul’s neck while he develops a crush on his younger Croatian care-giver, Marijana. As she massages his truncated limb, he longs to become a surrogate father to her three children despite her devotion to her auto-mechanic husband, Miroslav. A retired photographer and divorcé, Paul is full of regrets; his sole gift to posterity will be a collection of Fauchery prints from the 1800s: “What could be worse than dying childless, terminating the line, subtracting oneself from the great work of generation? Worse than miserly, in fact: unnatural.”

So far, so frustrating; the close brush with death that might have jump-started Paul’s life “has done nothing of the sort”. This is when Elizabeth steps in. Grey-haired, weak-hearted, 72, she shows up at his flat, and in an attempt to write a good story, or turn Paul into a worthy protagonist, pushes him towards a series of dramatic moments (prowling, watching, scribbling). But Paul continues with his habits of rejection, resisting Elizabeth at every turn, and suggesting that she open a puppet theatre or a zoo.

This novel is as concerned with the mysteries of creation as it is with the obscurities of extinction. How does a story take root in a writer’s mind? What differences lie between narrative prospects and real ones? How does an author allow their subject to work out his own salvation? Here, as in previous novels, Coetzee takes a Conradian interest in the fates and personalities of his characters, letting them tread the border between life and the world beyond; if “dying turns out to be nothing but a trick that might as well be a trick with words”. To put it another way: Elizabeth and Paul are two spirits imprisoned in a literary afterlife or some sort of mythical purgatory.

Slow Man may lack the range of Coetzee’s masterpieces Disgrace and Michael K, but it is a sensational act of double-exposure: on one side a renowned writer at the close of her career, feeling disillusioned with her own art; on the other, a man at the end of his sexual life, coming to terms with his own mortality. (It’s surely no coincidence that Paul is the same age as Coetzee, who is rumoured to be a regular cyclist in Adelaide). What makes their relationship even more fascinating is that they can’t decide if they love or hate each other.

Novalis said that “Every book contains a counter-book”; Slow Man’s main story is less compelling than its counter book, which exists in glimpses as Coetzee offers his readers certain fictional possibilities and then denies them. While some may wish he had followed these paths, most will be happy to abandon themselves to another exemplary tale of suffering from one of the best writers of our time, who dares to articulate our incomprehensible existence, and manages it with extraordinary and sensitive eloquence.

Secker & Warburg, £15.99; 272pp
£14.39 (free p&p)
0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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