It's very novel, but is it actually a novel?

Elizabeth Costello
by JM Coetzee
Secker & Warburg £14.99, pp233

When a composer turns the incidental music for a play into a concert suite, or recasts a film score as a symphony, no one turns a hair. But when an acclaimed novelist offers his public a book with an invented protagonist which seems more like a series of essays or lectures than an actual work of fiction, as JM Coetzee has done with Elizabeth Costello, he is crossing more lines than Grieg or Vaughan Williams ever did. The subtitle of the book is 'Eight Lessons'. Its genre might be defined as Non-Non-Fiction (sic).

The imaginary Elizabeth Costello is herself a novelist, an Australian born in 1928. Her best-known work is The House on Eccles Street (1969), in which she gives Molly Bloom from Ulysses her own story to tell. Thanks mainly to that novel, as permanent an achievement in its own way as the masterpiece from which it derives, she is in demand at literary conferences. She rarely manages to tell people what they want to hear.

Delivering the annual Gates Lecture at Appleton College in Massachusetts, she compares the treatment of animals in the modern world to the Holocaust, and those who would rather not know about abattoirs and factory farms with the Poles in the vicinity of Treblinka who chose not to think about the ash on the wind. Invited to speak in Amsterdam on 'Witness, Silence and Censorship', she finds herself convinced in late life that certain things should not be represented. The imaginative exploration of darkness is more likely to spread it than produce enlightenment.

Elizabeth can't account for her beliefs, even the deepest ones. Certainly, they isolate her rather than connect her with others. Throughout the book, Coetzee has pointed things to say about writers and belief. Asked to come up with a statement of what she believes, his heroine can do no better than to say: 'I am a writer, and what I write is what I hear. I am a secretary of the invisible, one of many secretaries over the ages. That is my calling: dictation secretary. It is not for me to interrogate, to judge what is given me. I merely write down the words and then test them, test their soundness, to make sure I have heard right.' Pressed further, she can only say: 'I have beliefs but I do not believe in them.'

There's another formulation, coming from early in the book, which is ultimately more haunting: 'Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.' Haunting not so much for its inherent suggestiveness but because it so accurately describes the function of Elizabeth Costello herself in the book - a battery to make ideas run. She has past experiences, to be sure, but they always further the argument of the moment.

She has a son who is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, so as to dramatise the divide between arts and sciences. Her daughter-in-law is an academic philosopher, who defends her patch at the appropriate juncture. Elizabeth's sister, Bridget, is a nun who has devoted herself to looking after Aids patients in Zululand - cue intimate confrontation between humanist and religious positions. It's announced that Elizabeth plans to visit her daughter in Nice after a conference, but the visit isn't referred to again, so this character's contribution to the didactic structure of the family (will she be a translator, a composer, a psychic?) is a matter for guesswork.

Even the heroine's inmost experiences, of sexual pleasure, generosity or trauma, feel like enrichments of the debate rather than revelations of character. When John Updike in his Bech books adopts an alter ego who is a writer, he taps into a much richer stream of sensations and insights, writing as a gentile about a Jew, than JM Coetzee does, across a divide assumed to be starker.

As the book goes on, it becomes more abstract, rather than less. Its postscript ('Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos, to Francis Bacon') has no connection with Elizabeth Costello, and the last lesson, 'At the Gate' is a speculation, suffused with Kafka, about the mechanics of the afterlife. Lesson seven, 'Eros', examines the couplings in Greek mythology between gods and human beings, prompted by a poem of Susan Mitchell's. This is the only part of the book in which Elizabeth Costello is at home in Melbourne, rather than shuttling between centres of culture, but the effect is no less disembodied. Nothing local impinges.

One chapter which promises drama and then withholds it is lesson six, 'The Problem of Evil'. Elizabeth Costello is faced in Amsterdam, rather, with a problem in etiquette: she had intended to use The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, a novel by Paul West, as her key example of a book which increased rather than diminished the world's supply of wickedness, by entering too vividly into the depravity of Hitler's executioners. This was a book to which she responded in a review which she then suppressed.

Then she finds that West is attending the conference. After trying to purge her paper of specific references, she gives it as planned, but only after giving West a warning of what is to come, and braces herself for an explosive reaction. Nothing happens. She is politely thanked for an interesting talk.

Paul West is a real person, the novel a real book published as long ago as 1980. It may be that Coetzee himself had a strong reaction to it, which he didn't then make public. If so, this chapter, in which he introduces West as a presence while refraining from putting even a single word into his mouth, and can delegate his own opinions to a persona, may be a further attempt to get it off his chest. And still his readers are entitled to feel cheated.

Some unconventionally structured books insist on their miscellaneousness, as Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters does (another book with a speculative chapter about the workings of the afterlife), seeking the status of a suite rather than a symphony. Others, like Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, achieve a miraculous unity while seeming to go off in all directions. In Elizabeth Costello, though, JM Coetzee seems simply hamstrung by the hybrid status of his inventions. Perhaps to play this sort of game winningly you need just that - a sense of play.

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