The title of this splendid, Booker Prize-winning novel sums it up: no redemption is at hand. Everything David holds valuable is smashed or violated in its turn, most terribly his daughter, who’s raped on her remote farm by black strangers she refuses to condemn. David can’t understand her stoicism; she rejects his rage.
Despite the snarled moralities that keep this story dark, light and air seem to push up between the sentences like tiny, repeated miracles. Coetzee writes with a cool, calm lucidity that fends off despair, and his characters find a kind of peace in acceptance, if not hope. The history of his country precludes a traditionally satisfying resolution. In the end David learns to survive the way his daughter does–by foraging for decency, just enough to live on, in a hellish universe.
