Age of Iron Literary Elements

Literary Fiction

Cape Town, South Africa; late 1980s; states of emergency called across the country due to unrest over apartheid

The narrator is Mrs. Curren, a seventy-year-old retired university professor who has just learned she is dying of bone cancer. The novel is written as a letter from her to her estranged daughter, who moved to the U.S. from South Africa in 1976.

The tone is searching and urgent, exhausted and confessional. Considering Curren's intended audience—her daughter, an audience of one—which differs but also overlaps with Coetzee's audience, which is all readers but includes middle-class white beneficiaries of racism, the mood depends on the perspective of the reader. It may be one of guilt, recognition, understanding, pity, or outrage, or a combination thereof.

Curren is the protagonist. There is no concrete antagonist embodied by a single character. The antagonist forces in the book include apartheid, police brutality, white privilege, and white supremacy.

The major conflict, introduced at the very beginning of the book, is that Curren is dying of cancer. A related conflict is that she's grappling with her relationship with her daughter, her country, and her legacy and mortality.

The climax of the book occurs when the police murder John in Curren's house.

Curren frequently refers to Vercueil's otherworldly, angelic qualities, positioning him as an "angel of death" of sorts and foreshadowing her death in his arms.

As a classicist, Curren is constantly alluding to works of Greek and Roman literature, particularly Virgil's Aeneid, reciting Latin verses, Christian constructs like limbo, Pagan gods, and elements of Eastern religion like Nirvana. The title of the book is derived from Hesiod.

Coetzee uses both pastoral and urban imagery—the novel shuttles between the more urban streets of Cape Town to landscapes of the coast, to the wasted, burning lands of settlements under siege.

Curren's foray into Site C parallels Aeneas's trip to the underworld in Virgil's "Aeneid." An instance of parallelism within the novel is that Curren's Hillman breaks down as her health depletes. She often refers to the car as an example of how she's letting go of the world.

Terms like witdoeke refer to different factions within the struggle against and for apartheid.

Curren often personifies her cancer in terms of creatures like grubs and crabs, hungrily eating their way through her.