Secker £16.99 pp265

JM Coetzee is one of the great novelists of omission. In our era of Google-prose, when so many novels are bulked up on the steroid of data, his lean, hard works stand out. None of his books is longer than 300 pages; most are under 200. He has always eschewed more than he has bitten off.

His imagination is allegorical and pictorial, rather than stylistic. It is hard to recall a sentence from his novels, but it is impossible to forget some of their scenes: the line of captives strung together by a single strand of fine wire, which runs through puncture holes in their cheeks (Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980), for instance, or the gang rape that occurs on the remote Karoo farmstead in Disgrace (1999).

Coetzee’s excellence has been so sustained, his fictional interventions (for this is what, with their stern politics, they resemble) so precise and compelling, that one experiences a quiet shock at reading Slow Man. Because this is not only unmistakably Coetzee’s least accomplished work, it is also, by more general standards, a mediocre novel.

On its opening page, Paul Rayment, an Australian man who is “without dependents” and on the brink of old age, is hit by a car while bicycling. The crash is brilliantly described, and is the novel’s finest moment: “he hears rather than feels the impact of his skull on the bitumen, distant, wooden, like a mallet-blow . . . he . . . slides metre after metre, on and on, until he is quite lulled by the sliding. He lies stretched out, at peace. It is a glorious morning”.

Rayment survives, but his right leg is amputated above the knee, without his consent, by the medical team who are working to save him. The remainder of the novel measures the contraction and dilation of his post-operative life. Coetzee recounts his absorption into the systems of care: physiotherapy, counselling, home-nursing. As Rayment’s stump (which he comes to call “le jambon”, because of “its resemblance to cured ham”) heals, so his mental health festers. He comes to worry that he might “die of indifference to the future”.

This account of injury and its consequences continues, fascinatingly, for the novel’s first third. We come to realise that Coetzee is scrutinising the concept of “care”: the ethics of a responsibility that is not reciprocal. We learn of the curious and unhappy intimacies that exist between carer and patient — the groin baths, the catheters, the unbidden and ill-timed erections. And then, 80 pages in, suddenly and disastrously, the novel changes its tone and its direction. The doorbell rings. Rayment has a visitor. Standing on his step is Elizabeth Costello.

Costello is, of course, the “celebrated Australian novelist” who was the subject of Coetzee’s previous novel, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003). She has, we puzzlingly learn, turned up in Slow Man because Paul Rayment is a character in the book she is writing. “This is not something I have done before, Mr Rayment,” she tells him. “You came to me, that is all I can say. You occurred to me — a man with a bad leg and no future and an unsuitable passion.”

From here until the novel’s end, Costello is always present, involving herself in Rayment’s life, offering an intrusive ethical commentary on his behaviour, discussing his status as her “character”. She and Rayment bicker, and their bickering comes to form a broken discussion of the relationship between a novelist and her subject. The effect of this meta-fictional invasion is ruinous. From the moment of Costello’s arrival, the novel’s plausibility is abolished. Coetzee continues to investigate the ideas of care and love, but he also speculates aridly on the nature of literary creativity. These two types of language — the humane and the theoretical — grate painfully against one another, and against the reader, even as Coetzee tries to make them knit.

It is hard for Coetzee. We are so accustomed to his immense tidiness as a novelist, that the slightest muddle in his work looks like chaos. But there is no excusing the jumbledness of Slow Man, its indecisive mix of intentions and forms. Coetzee seems to sense the novel’s unwilled disorder when he writes, almost apologetically, that “somehow, in ways so obscure, so labyrinthine, that the mind baulks at exploring them, the need to be loved and the storytelling . . . are connected”. A vagueness of connection is all we encounter in Slow Man.

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