Do not miss this book, which reads almost like a man saying goodbye, restlessly surveying his work and thanking the artists who have given him pleasure – composers such as Bach and novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the “great-souled” Russians to whom its narrator defers. JM Coetzee, the winner of the Nobel prize in Literature and (twice) the Booker – for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999) – may be the greatest living writer in English, although as he points out in this playful and intelligent new novel, artists do not believe in competitions. Diary of a Bad Year is a brilliant piece of writing, probably his best since Disgrace, though both Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Slow Man (2005) were extremely good. Like Elizabeth Costello, the new novel mixes fiction with philosophical debate; like Slow Man, and unlike most of Coetzee’s work, it has what can only be called a happy ending, something hard-won, touching and transforming.

Diary of a Bad Year centres around the same question that obsessed Disgrace: how can we recover from shame? In Disgrace the shame seemed a personal matter: an arrogant South African academic falls apart after sexually pursuing a mixed-race student. Diary of a Bad Year by contrast is about the shame that falls upon citizens of the countries that attacked Iraq and subscribed to Guantanamo Bay. Should we feel guilty? Modern Britons manage to live with their imperial past rather cheerfully, Coetzee’s narrator suggests, by saying they are quite different people from those “dour, stiff” Victorian imperialists. But how can South Africans (like Coetzee himself) disentangle themselves morally from their history of apartheid? This last, we may guess, is pivotal to all Coetzee’s investigations of shame and guilt.

Despite its grave theme, this is a high-spirited and even a happy book. Happiness comes from the delightful if not always wholly convincing Anya, who begins as a Lolita figure in a short red shift, bending in front of the ageing narrator in the laundrette of the flats where they live, and later typing his manuscript. The narrator, C, is a novelist in almost every respect like Coetzee, currently writing an extended essay on the state of the world for a collection called Strong Opinions. The plot seems predictable, but is not. C initially flatters Anya that she will be his editor, without believing it. But Anya turns out to be witty and shrewd, and her intuitive responses change the shape of C’s writing. A friendship between the two survives the venal intrusions of Anya’s lover Alan, a financial advisor, crook and bully.

The pleasure this book gives is partly a matter of its formal inventiveness. Each page is divided into three, and the three sections read independently, though there are many subtle intertwinings. Usually the top section is C’s essay, the middle section his private thoughts about Anya, the bottom section Anya’s thoughts and descriptions of her life with Alan. This sounds confusing, but is not. It is tempting, of course, to neglect the essay and read the personal stories, but that is partly Coetzee’s point; that without emotion, adventure, the unpredictable, thought is dead. And, in fact, the personal stories are made more interesting by their extended, Bach-like counterpoint with the essay.

Strong Opinions is another reference to Nabokov, whose collected interviews were published under that name, but halfway through the novel C, learning from Anya, abandons both his impersonal style and the rather arrogant title.

This novel is almost a thought experiment: what would have happened if the heroes of Disgrace and Slow Man had restrained themselves? What kind of love is possible for a man who knows he is beyond sexual adventures, and what kind of woman could give it? If evil is possible (Alan is evil precisely because he is without shame) then so, this book suggests, is goodness. Anya represents it in the form of charitable love, but also as fun, lightness and realism, all attributes that the hero of the book overtly lacks. Yet by creating a stiff, cold alter ego who is in love with warmth and lightness, Coetzee is forcing his imagination to transcend its habitual restraint. And though C the essayist never pinpoints a way of escaping shame, the story that the real Coetzee unfolds provides a pragmatic solution: change your behav-iour and be lucky enough to find someone forgiving like Anya. In his generous, flawed evocation of the inner life of a woman who despite suffering can love and turn the other cheek, Coetzee seems to me to have attempted something new in his work, and demonstrated the Tolstoyan greatness of soul he fears he lacks.

Diary of a Bad Year by JM Coetzee
Harvill Secker £16.99 pp231
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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