David Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing has a similar title to Kannemeyer’s biography, but it is a very different kind of book. It is being described as a ‘literary biography’, but this does not convey the essence of its approach. It makes no attempt to give a comprehensive account of Coetzee’s life: biographical facts are discussed only when there is a demonstrable connection to his writing. Nor is the book an intellectual biography as such, or a work of biographical criticism that seeks interpretative answers in the author’s personal experiences.

J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is, rather, an illuminating work of archival criticism. Attwell is one of the world’s pre-eminent Coetzee scholars. He knows his subject’s work inside-out and has collaborated with Coetzee to produce the essential volume Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (1992). In J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing, Attwell does not set out to offer interpretations of the endlessly scrutinised published fictions, but turns his attention to Coetzee’s notebooks and manuscripts, most of which are now archived at the University of Texas, in order to give an account of the process of creation. It turns out that Coetzee’s novels appear to be so painstakingly constructed and deeply thought through because, well, they are.

‘Coetzee’s fictions ... seem to have a remarkable ability to scrutinise their own premises’

Attwell considers each of Coetzee’s novels in turn, though they do not receive equal treatment. Age of Iron (1990), which Attwell sees as a tribute to Coetzee’s mother, and Summertime (2009), which is about Coetzee’s relationship with his father, are discussed side-by-side. But these complementary chapters are comparatively brief, perhaps because the archival material relating to these two rich novels was limited or unrevealing. Coetzee’s most recent novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) also receives only a few cursory paragraphs at the very end (and doesn’t make it into the bibliography), presumably because the relevant notebooks are not yet available.

The best chapters are, perhaps unsurprisingly, those that consider novels in which Coetzee is explicitly grappling with some of his most significant literary influences. Attwell’s detailed examination of the genesis of The Master of Petersburg (1994) – a dark, grief-stricken and uncharacteristically forbidding book – reveals the intensity and thoroughness with which Coetzee engaged with Dostoevsky’s legacy. The chapter on Foe (1986) similarly demonstrates that the novel’s depictions of the narrator Susan Barton and Cruso’s mute servant Friday are hard-won. More importantly, it also shows how Coetzee’s imaginative recasting of Daniel Defoe’s fiction informed his thinking about a problem of expression that resonates throughout much of his work from that period – namely, the question of how to acknowledge the injustice of colonialism when one is the historical beneficiary of that unjust system.

J.M.Coetzee (photograph by Bert Nienhaus)

A good example of the virtue of Attwell’s approach is his chapter on the issue of censorship, ‘The Burning of the Books’, which has at its centre the complicated series of negotiations between Coetzee, his publishers, and the South African censors over his second novel, In the Heart of the Country (1977). As Attwell establishes, Coetzee’s attempts to navigate this treacherous issue were inconsistent, even contradictory, but can nevertheless be understood as part of a larger intellectual and creative struggle.

The chapter’s title is taken from an abandoned fiction that predates In the Heart of the Country and features a character who works as an official censor. In that work’s failed attempt to think through the implications of living under the censorious apartheid regime, Coetzee was also trying to resolve, as Attwell puts it, ‘some basic questions about the kind of fiction he was after’. Fascinatingly, one month after abandoning the work, Coetzee applied (unsuccessfully) to become a censor. Though Attwell does not presume to make any definitive pronouncement about Coetzee’s motivations for taking such a curious step, it would seem to be an indication of the argument Coetzee was having with himself, which came to inform his fiction, about the relationship of his work to its political context, about his responsibilities as a writer, and about how best to balance questions of necessity, pragmatism, and principle.

Attwell traces Coetzee’s thinking on censorship through to a later public disagreement with Nadine Gordimer over the threats made against Salman Rushdie following the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988), and on to Coetzee’s writings on the subject in Giving Offence: Essays on Censorship (1996). In doing so, Attwell connects the specific political question of censorship to the deeper currents of Coetzee’s writing. He traces the evolution of Coetzee’s thinking toward a view of the issue that is not political in the narrow sense, but is highly conscious of the psychological deformations that a censorious regime engenders – a view that is reflected in his fiction’s scrupulous interrogation of the kinds of structural oppressions that are so pervasive that they become internalised and encoded in the very means of expression.

‘J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing is, rather, an illuminating work of archival criticism’

To the extent that J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing does constitute a literary biography of sorts, it is in the sense that Attwell reveals something of the creative struggle that lies behind the novels. He provides a partial explanation for the processes through which Coetzee’s writing has brought itself to that condition of self-awareness, which grants it such a remarkable degree of poise and the remarkable ability to give voice to its own doubts and uncertainties. Coetzee is, as Attwell observes, a writer who feels himself to be ‘between cultures and systems of symbolic value’; his work is notable for its sometimes earnest, sometimes teasing dramatisations of problems language, confession and representation, which are, among other things, intrinsic to the genres of biography and autobiography. It is perhaps appropriate that Coetzee should become the subject of a very worthwhile ‘literary biography’, which is not really a biography at all.