The Death of Jesus: J.M. Coetzee (Jesus-trilogy, 3) Hardcover – 30 May 2020

The slightly inferior production of this volume (in hardback), compared to the previous two, suggested to me that some readers were losing enthusiasm for the trilogy, or the publishers were. I have read all three volumes and am still baffled as to the meaning or purpose of it. Is the "Jesus" in the title meant to indicate a saviour, or what? The writing is characteristically skilful, but I am not sure I would want to reread the whole thing.

Deceptively simple.Concise and aphorismatic as if it is an ageless Holly book.Effortlessly poetic.Coetzee,the Master Storyteller,sets a trap to readers via a quasi-symbosis between his novel and The Adventures of Don Quixote.Did I read the novel of the year in the beginning of the year?

This concludes this strangely haunting trilogy which is a sort of parable of our life on earth and the myths we live by - whether Jesus or Don Quixote. Written in a flat passionless style, very matter of fact, in a land which is Spanish (like Quixote) and yet one of the main characters is the Dostoevskian madman Dimitri (the name of a central character in 'The Brothers Karamazov'), who perhaps gives us the biggest clue to how to read the books: "What we want, what all of us want, is the word of illumination that will throw open the doors of our prison and bring us back to life......For that is what the world is, from a certain perspective, a prison in which you decay into crook-backedness and incontinence and eventually death and then (if you believe certain stories, which I do not) wake up on some foreign shore where you have to play out the rigmarole all over again" - which is exactly the scenario presented in the books where the central characters arrive in a new country remembering nothing of where they come from. The precocious child David is adopted by two people who barely know each other, but he comes increasingly to insist he is an orphan. He is a Jesus-like figure and like one can easily imagine would have been the case with the young Jesus he is an uncomfortable and in many ways obnoxious child, fond of ordering people about to pander to his whims. He queries the purpose of his own existence, and we are tantalised with the possibility that he has that special message, that 'word of illumination' we crave, or whether he is yet another false prophet. Meanwhile he seduces many to follow him and to claim special access to him.I read these books as a commentary on our human situation and on our attempts to feel special in the universe, our Quixotic quest to find meaning, and the Dostoevskian tragedy which is our reality. They are odd, disconcerting, and compelling.

Don Quixote, so often referenced and slyly altered in Coetzee's trilogy, is a great novel about everything, and so is the trilogy itself. If we are looking for one meaning, or decodable allegories, we are constantly wrong-footed and mystified, but if we are looking for a very moving and engaging fiction we will be completely satisfied. What was the boy David's message or mission finally? We will never know, but I for one feel rewarded by this book, and not cheated. What a great and much misunderstood writer (like Ishiguro) he is.