Disgrace (Penguin Essential Editions) (Paperback)

I found it easier to pity Lurie rather than sympathise with him, which is sometimes a disadvantage in a main character. However, the writer's understanding of women's nature made Lucy come alive and my empathy for her meant that her actions were easier to understand and justify than Lurie's were. One of the book's strengths is its descriptive passages which allow the reader to build up a good picture of the setting and put the lives and often harsh actions of the characters into context.

I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys an engaging story. The essence of the book is quite dark, and there is not much to be upbeat about by the end of the novel. However, rather than be depressing, the book encourages you to question where your sympathies lie and seems to be some sort of lesson in moral standards.

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David, the principal character, is an empty, desiccated, husk of a man. It would be easy to call him bitter, but it's hard to see what could have caused such bitterness, other than perhaps a thousand small disappointments amidst the waste of his life in this unwelcoming country. His primary emotions - those which drive him, which he controls - are calculating, callous, unfeeling. He regards Melanie (the student and cause of his downfall) less as a conquest than a trinket... he toys with the idea of making her more than this but is ultimately careless, in the literal sense of the word. Careless and uncaring in his attitudes, he is surprised by the anger which his actions stir up in others - her lover, her family, his colleagues. Even here, confronted by the collapse of the structure of his life - his job, his home, his colleagues - his reaction is lethargic, langorous. You wonder what could stir this man to a passionate response. A visit to his daughter Lucy in the veldt throws him into a different world, of barren heat and dust, hardship, dogs, and a simmering antipathy between the white settlers of the land and the black natives who are gradually reasserting themselves. It also brings an experience which even he cannot shrug off - the brutal robbery and violation of his daughter, and an assault on himself by fire which he leaves him stunned, and in some ways ridiculous, his hair burned away, his head half shrouded by bandages. The experience ages him too...

Themes of heat, dust, fire and dryness persist through this novel. There are echoes of older writers in the descriptions of the wasted landscapes - like Eliot's Gerontion, he is suddenly an old man in a dry month, in a country which, in an ironic counterpoint to Yeats, is 'no country for old men'.

None of the themes or narrative lines in the book is brought to completion. There is no resolution, no satisfaction, for the protagonists or the reader. That David is a Professor of Communications is an obvious irony - every line of communication (or reconciliation later in the novel) evaporates in the heat or disappears into the dust - with Melanie's family, with Bev, with his ex-wife, with Melanie herself. The men in the book behave like jackals throughout, preying on women... the men who rape David's daughter differ only in degree from David himself. Lucy's feeling that in some sense her assailants have a right to avail themselves of her is echoed by David's assumption of droit de seigneur over his students. Small, passing cruelties between men and women recur through the book...

This is a bleak and nihilistic book, which leaves the impression that there is little hope for relations between peoples in Africa... and little enough for relations between peoples elsewhere. At the end of the book, as David, reduced to nothing, begins to develop his opera - Byron in Italy - the possibility of redemption through passion, love and longing arises. Eventually, though, even this is reduced to a terrible howl of pain and loneliness, echoed by the confined and doomed dogs at the clinic, howling at the moon from their dusty kennels, accompanied by the thin, mechanical clank of David's banjo. The final scene, as David condemns his last dog to death, is like the flickering of a flame being snuffed out, and almost unbearably sad - the last gesture of love and affection which the dog has shown him destroyed with the animal.

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At fifty-two Professor David Lurie is divorced, having been married twice, he has, in his mind solved the problems of sex rather well, filled with desire but lacking in passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless. David is still unwilling to admit that sexual fulfilment and passion have passed him by. He believes in romance, as the romantic poets about whom he teaches believe in the wonder of nature. However, as the story unfolds he comes to realise and accept that for him sexual relationships will no longer hold passion or meaning. Before this realisation he has one moment when he feels pure gratitude for all the women in his life. His complacency is short lived, for piece by piece his life begins to crumble around him. As a professor of modern languages, who, under the guise of "the great rationalisation," has now been relegated to adjunct professor. He now teaches Communications 101 at Cape Technical University, formerly Cape Town University College. Post-apartheid South Africa has also gone through a process of rationalisation, and a brittle affair with a student in his romantic poetry class leads to him being fired on sexual harassment charges, and he now seeks refuge at his daughter's house in the country hoping to write a libretto on Byron.

Rural South Africa presents David with a harsh and violent reality, forcing him to reassess life as he has lived it. His daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbour, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. Lucy is held by her love for the land. The visit to his daughter Lucy in the veldt throws him into a different world, of barren heat and dust, hardship, dogs, and a simmering antipathy between the white settlers of the land and the black natives who are gradually reasserting themselves...

Aptly titled, this is a novel about the carrying of disgrace on a daily, human level, about the way that what happens in one fractured family reflects a greater national whole. I came to sympathise with David, and by the end of the book I felt saddened for him. This book sheds light on a society, whose problems are largely forgotten by the West, but who are still struggling to come to terms with there own history. A truly beautifully written novel.

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