This is mostly directed at the narrator's own aspirations, such as his belief - the idiot child of Walter Pater and DH Lawrence - that art should be 'hard and clear like a flame', a flame to which women are irresistibly drawn, to light a dark absence peculiarly their own. Beneath the tranquil flow of the prose is a biting current of irony. That 'love as well' very much sets the tone of the book. there must be intimacy, passion, love as well'. He hopes to be a writer, but soon realises that 'art cannot be fed on deprivation alone. Living frugally (marrowbone soup, cauliflower in white sauce), he supplements his income by working in the library. The said John is studying mathematics at the University of Cape Town in the 1950s. One might even think the problem is real. One might think them the opposite of the frigidity of which John Coetzee is sometimes accused. these sometimes contradictory qualities are what its narrator, 'John', hopes for. The search for tenderness, it turns out, is the subject of this new novella, Youth, which seems very much a portrait of the artist as a young man. At the same time, the feeling remains that he has every gift except tenderness.

But that it might do so is the one illusion a Coetzee novel permits us. His wary governance against comfort, against the slide into complacent thinking and language, can never prevent the reader's own. Then again, the frank 'no', the refusal to allow himself or his readers to be under illusions, is the flip side of Coetzee's unflinching gaze, the reason why his novels, like a good dose of salts, are a necessary purgative, to be prized rather than dreaded. Admittedly, it was a rather stupid question, but one felt he might have been a little more generous. Sharing a panel with Coetzee at a reading, I remember him responding to a question from the audience with the words, 'frankly, no'. If the game includes being 'nice' to your fans, then tough. Although the excuse was given of a prior engagement, the author's non-appearance at the Booker ceremony only served to illustrate the point.

Youth coetzee