Product Description

In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors. Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son. A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep.

Brilliantly crafted and resonant with metaphor, Age of Iron is "a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone." (The New York Times Book Review)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52957 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Harsh, unflinching and powerful, Coetzee's ( Waiting for the Barbarians ) new novel is a cry of moral outrage at the legacy that apartheid has created in South Africa. In scenes of stunning ferocity, he depicts the unequal warfare waging between the two races, a conflict in which the balance of power is slowly shifting. An elderly woman's letters to her daughter in America make up the narrative. Near death from rapidly advancing cancer, Cape Town resident Mrs. Curren is a retired university professor and political liberal who has always considered herself a "good person" in deploring the government's obfuscatory and brutal policies, though she has been insulated from the barbarism they produce. When the teenage son of her housekeeper is murdered by the police and his activist friend is also shot by security forces, Mrs. Curren realizes that "now my eyes are open and I can never close them again." The only person to whom she can communicate her anguished feelings of futility and waste is an alcoholic derelict whom she prevails on to be her messenger after her death, by mailing the packet of her letters to her daughter. In them she records the rising tide of militancy among young blacks; brave, defiant and vengeful, they are a generation whose hearts have turned to iron. His metaphors in service to a story that moves with the implacability of a nightmare, Coetzee's own urgent message has never been so cogently delivered.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is the South African novelist's most direct indictment of apartheid yet. It takes the form of a letter-diary from Mrs. Curren, a former classics professor dying of cancer, to her daughter in America. She details a series of strange events that turn her protected middle-class life upside down. A homeless alcoholic appears at her door, eventually becoming her companion and confessor. Her liberal sentiments and her very humanity are tested as she experiences directly the horrors of apartheid. She comes to recognize South Africa as a country in which the rigidity of both sides has led to barbarism and to acknowledge her complicity in upholding the system. Less allegorical than Coetzee's previous novels, this is still richly metaphoric. A brilliant, chilling look at the spiritual costs of apartheid. Recom mended.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
A lament for a country on the cusp of change. Coetzee tells the story of a retired university teacher who discovers, on the same day she learns she is dying with cancer, that an alcoholic vagrant has taken up residence in her back yard. The woman's dreams contrast sharply with the political and social situation that surrounds her. This is both an indictment of the violence of apartheid and a harrowing portrait of personal grief. Winner of the 1990 Sunday Express Award. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

intelligent and accurate
age of iron is a quietly tragic retelling of an elderly woman's final days, superimposed on an account of the deadly social turmoil in south africa in the late 80's. when the central character arrives to her home after learning of her condition, she discovers a homeless man sleeping between her house and that of her neighbors. is the man a symbol, a delivering angel? and if so, why has he come in this form, with his smell of whiskey and urine, his yellowing eyes, his contempt for her charity? in a parallel narrative, her own response to the chaos around her is a fitting commentary on white apathy: after two black children are attacked by police, her first impulse is to arm herself with a pen and paper and write a letter to her newspaper. and when she finds herself in the middle of a veritable battlefield, she can only mutter the words "i want to go home." this is book is coetzee's finest achievement, and may be his most overlooked.

Like Disgrace, this works lyrically on many levels at once
After finishing Coetzee's Booker-prize winning Disgrace, I found the Age of Iron. This is a moving internal first-person narrative of a cancer victim's final days, filled with graceful and disturbing reflections on a life lived and a death to come. Into the narrative come bursting the untidy eruptions of South Africa in the 1980's--township riots, the anger of blacks finally boiling to the surface, dead children martyred by the state, and homeless alcoholics--driving the tale far beyond a simple exegesis on life and death.

Once again, I discovered a disquieting novel written from within the cramped point of view of a protagonist who knows better but cannot seem to gain the courage or momentum to change how she or he relates to the world. And, once again, I was bowled over by the quiet and simple prose that hurtled the narrative to the end.

Coetzee's protagonists are deeply flawed--the attraction of the novel is to see if they find a state of grace or even understanding by the end. They can see the corruption in the world around them, can dispassionately view their own weaknesses as well. But they lack the clarity, or perhaps the courage, to act on what they see and know. Will they learn to act? That is the mystery that drives us to read with them.

The narrator, an old, dying woman, a former college professor, becomes one of the few white civilians to experience the Township riots. She sees black teenagers she has known since childhood shot and killed--even one who is murdered in her own home. Yet she does nothing except write a long letter to her daughter (it is sometimes so longwinded that you wish she would move on already!). She contemplates self-immolation as a protest, but this goes nowhere.

And, yet, she will not take the road of her daughter, who fled the horror of South Africa for a middle class life in the United States. It is as if her mere outraged presence is enough to subtly influence the white regime to be humane. In this, she is like so many other white South Africans of the 1980's (and probably like so many white Americans of the 1950's and Israeli's of the 1990's). She finds, brutally, horrifically, that her outrage has no influence. Even when she confronts the police/military in her own home, after they have murdered a teen in her backyard, they do not feign innocence to her--they understand her outrage but could care less.

Like Disgrace, this is a lyrical novel that works on so many levels at once. It would be much less interesting if solely written about a dying woman; so much more polemic if written solely about the injustice of South Africa.

Like the unseen daughter who may get the letter (if the very real Angel of Death in the novel delivers it), we can only read in mute anger and horror at the neutered conscience of white South Africa, frozen in its middle class lifestyle, afraid to look at the past or to contemplate the future, hoping it is all a bad dream and will all go away in the light of day. And, of course, it did not, could not. And, also of course, the Angel of Death will always win out, in the end, as mute and implacable as the machine of the state.

Heart rending, brutal vulnerability, savage triumph.
This is the third book written by Coetzee I have read (his two booker prize winners being the other two). This, like those, is nearly flawless. I have encountered no other living Author ('A' deliberate) so capable of revealing thruths and emotions. His writing is alternately a scourge and a bandage. He lays your bare before him and then sews you up again.

Age of Iron is obviously a book very close to his heart. It is dedicated to three deceased relatives, and was written during the Apartheid Riots in the late 1980's. This novel is required reading for persons of conscience and intellect.

Coetzee is probably the greatest living novelist. Carey, Unsworth, whomever you compare him to, his mastery of language and ideas is overwhelming.