Armageddon

By Patricia Blake

LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K by J.M. Coetzee

Viking; 184 pages; $13.95

In previous novels (In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians), J.M. Coetzee turned his apocalyptic eye on his native South Africa. The subjects of his books--race war, state violence and personal vengeance--had a distinctive local color. Now the Afrikaner author goes straight to the center of mankind's lust for self-destruction. The scene of Life and Times of Michael K is only incidentally South Africa. The subject is terminal civil war; the time is the end of the world.

In Coetzee's allegory, lawless street gangs have seized devastated cities; ferocious insurgents infest the countryside, blowing up railway tracks, mining the roads and attacking farmsteads; bands of robbers on the highways prey on the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been driven from their homes. The government tries to keep order through a system of forced-labor camps, gulags of the veld where prisoners are obliged to sing patriotic songs while being worked to death.

Michael K, the hero of this fearful fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos.

When war strikes, Michael K flees burned-out Cape Town on foot, wheeling his sick mother Anna in an improvised wheelbarrow. Their ordeal is infernal. Hounded by the police and by thieves, the pair get as far as a hospital, where Anna dies. Michael K is stripped of his money; all he has left is a cardboard box filled with his mother's ashes. Undeterred, he moves on to the place of his dreams, the abandoned farm on the arid South African tablelands of the Karoo, where his mother was born. There he scatters Anna's ashes, and there too he plants a handful of pumpkin and melon seeds. On the deserted land the fruits flourish, round and warm as children. Michael K changes. He feels bound to the land, even as he anticipates the inevitable stigmata. "I am becoming a different kind of man, he thought . . . If I were cut, he thought, holding his wrists out, looking at his wrists, the blood would no longer gush from me but seep, and after a little seeping dry and heal. If I were to die here . . . I would be dried out by the wind in a day, I would be preserved whole, like someone in the desert drowned in sand."

Michael K's "sacred garden" is trampled down by the police, who suspect him of terrorism. Seized and imprisoned, Michael K refuses to eat. A physician in the labor camp muses, "Maybe he only eats the bread of freedom." Still, Michael K has preserved a few seeds from the catastrophe. Though utterly emaciated, this wisp of a human creature slips away from his oppressors, so that he may live and die beside his pumpkin seeds. Coetzee mourns Michael K: "A creature that spends its waking life stooped over the soil, that when at last its time comes digs its own grave and slips quietly in and draws the heavy earth over its head like a blanket."

The author seems to be asking: "Shall the meek inherit the earth?" Like any other profound allegory, Life and Times of Michael K leaves the question it poses unanswered. But the warning it sounds of Armageddon resonates with uncommon power.

--By Patricia Blake