A Week in Books

As any reader of Disgrace will know, J M Coetzee has begun to explore the plight and the rights of animals. So it's somehow apt that he should behave like a wary specimen from an endangered species. After Coetzee won his unprecedented second Booker Prize last October (inevitably, he missed the dinner), this paper's US correspondent managed to interview the elusive novelist in Chicago. They sat in adjoining rooms and conversed via e-mail.

As any reader of Disgrace will know, J M Coetzee has begun to explore the plight and the rights of animals. So it's somehow apt that he should behave like a wary specimen from an endangered species. After Coetzee won his unprecedented second Booker Prize last October (inevitably, he missed the dinner), this paper's US correspondent managed to interview the elusive novelist in Chicago. They sat in adjoining rooms and conversed via e-mail.

Any public sighting of this shy beast is thus a rare event. He came to London briefly this week, to collect the Commonwealth Writers prize for Disgrace and have the audience with the Queen that winners also enjoy. And he actually gave a reading, in front of luminaries of the Commonwealth Foundation. Needless to say, JM didn't then sit around to shoot the breeze with questioners, letting fly with firm opinions on Robert Mugabe or South Africa's World Cup chances. Trim, poised, alert, he does look like some quicksilver predator, ready to dart back into the bush at the first glint off the barrels of the media poachers.

Yet what he did deliver was generous indeed: a new story, "The novel in Africa", deftly angled, in his trademark fashion, to fill the space between orthodox fiction and Socratic dialogue. Its chief character, the Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, also features in his recent dialectical tales about animal rights, just reprinted by Profile Books ( The Lives of Animals, £4.99).

While lecturing on a cruise ship, Elizabeth runs across an old sparring-partner and (we learn) lover: Emmanuel, a charming Nigerian writer who has given up on serious work for the easy pickings - financial and sexual - of the celebrity circuit. Through his lecture on African literature (or rather, his own self-serving version of it) and her sceptical responses, Coetzee spins the sort of richly ironic, shot-silk yarn whose nuances make his fiction so fluent to read and hard to label. The story left its listeners intrigued, excited, argumentative - fired up about it, not about him.

His hard-won impersonality pays huge dividends. The sage of Cape Town keeps the spotlight firmly on the work and not the man. To a biographical age, that counts as the ultimate heresy. And, much as it goes against the grain for a journalist to say so, I think we should leave him hidden in the fertile undergrowth.