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LACUNA

“It will be, after all, a child of this earth.
They will not be able to deny that.”
—from Disgrace by J.M. COETZEE

PROLOGUE

John Coetzee spent forty years writing a book.
It was to be a great novel of Dickensian scope and significance. An agent in London was very interested in the book. As the years passed, that agent died and was replaced by another agent, who was also very interested in it. At no time was either agent interested enough to sign John Coetzee as a client.

As retirement loomed, Coetzee realised it would be humiliating to leave the English Department before the book was published. Especially since he had been using extracts from it in his teaching for years. It had always been a question of when it would be published, not whether. If he were to retire from the department with the book still unpublished, there would be sniggering—definite sniggering.

John Coetzee was on the horns of a dilemma, and there he might have remained if something wonderful hadn’t occurred.

A young woman, a junior lecturer in the department, went to visit her father on his farm outside the Boland town of Worcester. While she was there, she was raped by a gang of intruders. The farmhouse was set alight, and everyone agreed she was fortunate to escape with her life.

Something about the story struck a chord with John Coetzee. He went home that night and began to write a novel about the incident. Before he went to bed, five thousand words had leaped from his brain onto his computer screen.

The Dickensian novel was never touched again. Instead, Coetzee poured all his energies into the rape book. Eight, nine, ten thousand words a day were nothing to him. The story gushed out. The first draft was finished in record time. This time, the agent was interested enough to sign Coetzee on the spot and to take the book to auction. Twelve publishing houses joined the bidding war and a seven-figure sum was decided upon. The news was announced days before the Frankfurt Book Fair, and became the stuff of legend in the publishing world.

The book was the most buzzed-about publishing event of the year. Pre-publication copies were sent to selected reviewers and bloggers who wrote about it in laudatory—nay, worshipful—terms. It zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists. Commentators ran out of superlatives with which to describe it.

A year later, it had won most of the literary awards for which it was eligible, including the Man Booker Prize. John Coetzee went overnight from provincial academic obscurity to becoming one of the most celebrated authors of his age.

He shook the dust of the English Department from his feet and retired to his home to write his much-anticipated second book.