Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
A Life Elsewhere
By John Banville
Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
by J.M. Coetzee
Viking, 166 pp., $22.95
It is a universal delusion that life elsewhere must be different. Like those antique authors who believed that in the Antipodes there were men whose heads grew under their arms, we have the vague conviction that extreme climates and bizarre landscapes will breed human beings utterly unlike us in their customs and rituals, their desires, their fears, their pleasures, and their pains. For a European reader, the most surprising thing about J.M. Coetzee's 'autobiographical' sketch (we shall account for those quotation marks in a moment) is how few surprises it contains. Boyhood in South Africa and boyhood in, say, small-town Ireland in the late 1940s and early 1950s seem uncannily similar. On every page one experiences successive soft shocks of recognition: the BSA bicycle, the Meccano set, Superman and Mandrake the Magician on the wireless, the Rover and Reader's Digest and The Story of San Michele, the head colds in winter and the summer visits to the farm, the terrors and inexplicable exaltations, the secret storms in the heart. As Philip Larkin ruefully has it, in a marvelous poem about childhood, 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'
Review, 3051 words
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