The Schooldays of Jesus - Jesus Series #2

"Passion can't be explained, it can only be experienced. More exactly, it has to be experienced from the inside before it can be understood from the outside"

The Schooldays of Jesus is the second book in the Jesus series by award-winning author, J.M.Coetzee. It follows on directly from The Childhood of Jesus and was longlisted for the2016 Man Booker Prize. David, Simon and Ines have left Novilla, perhaps as fugitives. In the town of Estrella, David and Ines find work on a farm until the harvest is over, while David spends the days with the children of other workers. Queries about David's schooling, now that he is almost seven, lead to his enrolment at the Academy of Dance, with tuition funded by the farm's owners.

The owner of the Academy of Dance teaches a philosophy with which Simon finds difficulty: the dances may be beautiful, but calling down numbers from the sky? The relationship that David forms with the Principal Attendant at the ground floor museum also concerns Simon, and he cannot deny feeling hurt by David's preference for the Academy's care over that of Ines and himself.

In this slightly bizarre, seemingly third-world and possibly post-apocalyptic setting, many of the characters are rather flat and passionless (although less so that in The Childhood of Jesus), often somewhat intriguing but not endearing: their strangeness allows Coetzee to explore their reactions and ideas. Coetzee uses both David's incessant questions and the encounters his characters have, in various scenarios, with officials, employers, a tutor, patrons, teachers, other parents and random strangers to philosophise about various aspects of life: identity, passion, the reliability of memories, kindness, meat eating, lust, culpability and the state of mind of the perpetrator, being in love, guilt, repentance, and forgiveness.

Readers may find allegory and deep meaning in the text (or perhaps not, as it never really becomes clear if there is any, and even readers who have read The Childhood of Jesus may be confused).The ending is, again, rather ambiguous and leaves scope for Coetzee to continue on this philosophical journey with the same characters in further books. At times surreal, often perplexing, this is another unique offering from Coetzee.