Making mischief: J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus is one almighty tease

Late in this final volume of a tantalising trilogy, we hear that its enigmatic boy hero ‘would never tell you his meaning directly. Always left it to you to puzzle things out.’ That verdict surely applies not only to the trio of gnomic novels that ends with The Death of Jesus. It fits the entirety of John Coetzee’s utterly lucid yet fiendishly elusive work. The South African Nobel laureate, resident in Australia since 2001, began his weird, stark but oddly hypnotic series of stories about an immigrant to a Spanish-speaking land and the ‘exceptional child’ he adopts with The Childhood of Jesus in 2013. The Schooldays of Jesus followed, and saw the gifted but brattish David shine as a prodigious dancer in the care of his often nonplussed guardian, Simón, and devoted adoptive mother, Inés.

The self-spoiling title of this final episode reveals the fate of the ten-year-old wonder. David insists that ‘I am nobody’s child’, but leaves his grieving followers with a sense that they have been ‘visited by a comet’.