Age of Iron

I read Coetzee's Age of Iron while traveling a few weeks ago, so my memory of the novel is fleeting. Nonetheless, I will share a few thoughts that lingered these past weeks. Like the last novel by Coetzee reviewed on this blog, this one is set in Cape Town during the last days of apartheid, and structured as a letter by a dying white woman to her daughter in the States, so written in second person. Stylistically and in terms of setting, it is reminiscent of Life & Times of Michael K in that the reader is treated to lengthy prose, similarly themed inner thoughts of the protagonists, and the landscape of Cape Town and its environs.  The narrator, Mrs. Curren, is a former professor who begins to befriend a homeless man whose race is not specified, Verceuil.

The title of the text refers to the 'iron generation' of black youth who are resisting apartheid while losing out on education, the innocence of childhood, and the decline of 'traditional' family life. This seemingly callous generation that is capable of great violence, shocks and disturbs the dying Curren, who sees the disillusionment, inequality, and hypocrisy of her own liberalism. Still, white South Africans have walked on the iron graves of the ancestors of black South Africans for generations, thereby causing this current generation of South African youth to lose their innocence to struggle for social equality in their country. Other themes of the novel include motherhood (Curren's relationship with her daughter, the use of motherhood to express the burdens of privilege and race white South Africans inherited long before apartheid), humanity, race, retaining humanity in the face of apartheid, death, animal rights (the graphic description of Florence's husband job of killing chickens for a living in an animal factory is quite chilling, or the power of animals as companions in the relationship between Verceuil and his likely stolen dog), as well as companionship.

Through Florence's son and his friend, children from Guguletu who are skipping their substandard schools and out in the streets resisting apartheid, Mrs. Curren is forced to examine her own relationship with white supremacy, her own complicity in the status quo. She experiences the death of Florence's son's friend at the hands of the police, witnesses the violence, roadblocks, and anger in the townships, befriends the homeless Verceuil for companionship and a friend to mail her letter to her daughter. Verceuil's race is never stated, perhaps because his ultimate role in the novel is to show the universality of the human experience and how companionship can transcend racial divisions in conditions of apartheid (although throughout the novel it is quite unclear what Verceuil's motivations are or if he will ever mail Curren's confessing letters).

I must say, some of the same themes of whiteness in South Africa and disillusionment recur in Coetzee's Disgrace, even in the similarities between the two protagonists (aged white academics). Coetzee seems to suggest that in Age of Iron, however, that there is more optimism and hope for a post-apartheid South Africa, even though Curren does not make it. Moreover, it is fascinating to see Coetzee tackle an older, female protagonist as a younger male writer. Just as thought provoking or troubling, is the disagreement Curren has with Florence's cousin, Mr. Thabane, a former teacher in support of the youth embracing anti-apartheid activism, a disagreement that symbolizes the seemingly unbridgeable gap between black South Africans and sympathetic white liberals who see black South Africans as going too far. One cannot help but think of the US Civil Rights Movement and how white moderates and liberals at various times endeavored to curtail or limit black mobilizing and activism.

Perhaps one day I will return to this novel, which clearly has much more to say on the state of affairs of South Africa (and the rest of humanity) below the surface. Likewise, Curren's relationship with Verceuil continues to fascinate me, perhaps suggesting what one New York Times critic suggests is the need for white South Africans to love the 'unlovable' to find redemption. The question of white South African liberalism also remains relevant to post-apartheid South Africa, just as the plight of the homeless and urban poor like Verceuil retains relevance to the social inequities, lack of love, and maintenance of an 'iron age' impedes actual reconciliation. Check out this for a well-written essay exploring Age of Iron, too.