Stephen Mulhall

I was resistant to JM Coetzee. I read his Tanner Lectures on 'The Lives of Animals', delivered to an audience of philosophers at Princeton, which introduced me to Elizabeth Costello who is Coetzee's alter ego and herself a novelist. Like a number of readers who reviewed the Lectures and, indeed, some of the philosophers who attended, I couldn't quite see why JM Coetzee should choose to address his audience through the medium of Elizabeth Costello. The Tanner Lectures led me on to the novel, 'Elizabeth Costello', in which this ageing and engaging woman figures in eight diverse chapters, which Coetzee has called 'Lessons'. In broad terms, Coetzee and Costello are concerned with the relation between perception and reality and, more particularly, with the relation between fiction and reality. They are both, I should add, also deeply concerned with the manifold cruelties that human beings inflict on animals. The novel 'Elizabeth Costello' led me on to Stephen Mulhall's meditation on Coetzee and Costello. Mulhall, if you can persist with him, will certainly make you take Coetzee, Costello and the nature of literary creation very seriously indeed. Mulhall writes with high cleverness and delight in his own virtuosity. Sentences of serpentine length and sinuosity wind their way down his pages. His is not the art that conceals art: Mulhall flaunts his virtuosity. And it is that, I think, which made him so valuable guide to JM Coetzee, who writes with such disarming simplicity and whose art did, for this reader at least, conceal his virtues until Stephen Mulhall made me sit up and take notice.… (mere)