Summary
The novel begins with the narrator, Mrs. Curren, describing to an unspecified reader her discovery of a "derelict" sleeping in "a house of carton boxes and plastic sheeting" (3) on her property. In the midst of describing the bedraggled, sleeping man, Mrs. Curren tells her reader that earlier that same day, she received very bad news from her doctor. Though she doesn't immediately reveal the exact nature of the news, she does tell her reader that the doctor, "behind the comradely front ... was [already] withdrawing. Sauve qui peut. His allegiance to the living, not the dying" (4).
Mrs. Curren shouts the vagrant awake and tells him to leave. He wordlessly rises and complies. Then, Mrs. Curren enters her empty house and continues addressing the "you" of the reader, which turns out to be her daughter, who has moved to the United States, married, and started a family of her own. Curren describes her longing for the days of the daughter's childhood, for the feeling of being the mother to a child, nurturing the beginning of a new life. She wishes that her daughter was there with her.
Later in the day, the vagrant returns. Curren consents to his staying there, but begins to establish terms of his residence. For starters, he's not allowed to start fires in the yard. She offers him food and he and his obedient dog (who Curren assumes he's stolen from a "good family") follow her into the house (19). Curren asks the man if he'd like to work for her, telling him that there is plenty he could do around the property for pay. The man doesn't answer, just drinks his coffee and eats some of the sandwich. Curren then lashes out, blaming the man for "wasting [his] life" (8). The man spits at Curren's feet and walks off into the yard.
Curren discusses the state of the youth in South Africa, the "soul-stunted" nature of all children on either side of the "great divide" (7). On the one hand, she describes the "roaming gangs ... of sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison house is already beginning to close" (7). On the other hand, there are the white children, ignorant and privileged, "their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins" (7).
Curren tries to leave the house to go shopping when she feels a shooting pain in her hip. The man living in her yard helps her to the couch, where she explains that she has cancer in her bones. He tells her her house is large and could be turned into a boarding house. She asks him about his disability, because he tells her he receives a disability pension. He shows her his hand—three of the fingers, pinkie through middle, are curled into the palm. Only the pointer and thumb can extend. Curren offers to pay him for cutting the lawn. He clips the hedges for an hour before giving it up, and she pays him for an hour's work.
Curren takes the pills she was prescribed for pain and fades into sleep. In the night, she hears the man moving through the house. She hears him walking from room to room, opening drawers. He takes some coins from a bag of foreign currency. He finds nothing of value and goes back to his makeshift bed in the yard.
The next day, the car won't start, so Curren asks the man to help her push it. She's going into Fish Hoek, and ends up asking him if he'd like to come along, so he and his dog join her in the car. On the car ride, Curren tells the man stories from her childhood, like one story about her mother as a child, when her mother's family would go camping in a wagon on the Piesangs River. Her mother, laying beneath the wagon in a makeshift camping bed, thought she saw the stars moving. She grew worried that it wasn't the stars, but rather the wagon wheels moving. She was seized by confusion and inaction, not sure whether the movement of the wheels was an illusion, or if she should wake her family. She ended up falling up asleep, having terrible nightmares of death, but when she woke, the wagon was still unmoved above her.
Curren and her new lodger park on an overlook of False Bay. The dog sniffs around the hedges while Curren watches a surfer ride a wave. She's overcome with emotion at the thought of leaving the world behind and begins to sob. She then apologizes to the man with her, who seems not even to have noticed. When they go to leave, they have to push the car again, except this time, she must start it in reverse, since she parked on an upward incline. Curren seizes up, and the man yells at her to gun the engine. Oncoming traffic honks their horns. Curren rides home feeling cowed and embarrassed by the whole situation.
Back at Curren's house, she offers to hire the man as a groundskeeper of sorts. He doesn't want to work for her. She tells him, "I know you are not a gardener ... and I don't want to turn you into what you are not. But we can't proceed on a basis of charity" (21). The man quietly asks her why, she replies that he doesn't deserve it, and the man, smiling to himself, says, "Deserve ... Who deserves anything?" (21). The whole encounter frustrates Curren so much that she thrusts her purse into the man's hands and tells him to just take whatever he wants. He takes out thirty rand and hands her back the purse, disappears for a short while, and returns to her property later that night, when Curren notes that she "hear[s] the clink of bottles" (21). When she asks for it, the man gives her what remains of the money he took. He now has a mattress. Curren explains that she is not stingy, but she believes that charity should come from the heart, and that both the recipient and giver of the charity must have their hearts in the exchange.
Over time, Curren and the man become more familiar with one another. He takes meals with her and occasionally does yard work for pay. One morning, Curren asks the man a favor. She tells him she has papers and letters she would like to mail to her daughter after she dies, but it must be after she dies. She asks him to put the parcel in the post for her after she dies. The man is clearly uncomfortable with committing to do this for her, but he ultimately agrees.
At the beginning of Part II, Curren's housekeeper, Florence, returns from seeing her family. Florence returns with all three of her children—two little girls and her fifteen-year-old son, Bheki. Florence informs Mrs. Curren that things are getting very bad in the townships surrounding Cape Town. The events of the novel take place during a declared state of emergency due to protests against apartheid in South Africa. Through Curren's conversations with Florence, the reader learns that the vagrant's name is Vercueil. Florence clearly doesn't trust Vercueil, but Curren is committed to letting him stay. She tells Florence, "If he gives us trouble I will ask him to leave .... But I can't send him away for things he hasn't done" (37).
Curren tries to consider the political state of South Africa, but finds it difficult to think about sweeping social change in the face of her own personal existential crisis, as she faces what are perhaps the final months of her life. She recalls a time from the previous year when she drove Florence and the children to Brackenfell, where Florence's husband, William, works at a poultry processing plant. His job is to slaughter chickens, and he does this all day, from sunup to sundown, six days a week. The image of William binding the chickens' legs as his coworker easily slit their throats has stayed with Curren. "A universe of labor," she writes of the experience of seeing William at work, "a universe of counting: like sitting in front of a clock all day, killing the seconds as they emerged, counting one's life away" (44).
Analysis
Like many of Coetzee's novels, Age of Iron deals with the injustices perpetuated by apartheid policies in South Africa. Segregationist policies had been a part of South Africa's national politics since the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910. Shortly after the nation-state was formed, the 1913 Land Act prevented Black Africans from buying or owning land outside of reservations. Taking place about seventy years later, Age of Iron follows the life of a seventy-year-old white woman, Mrs. Curren, who, because of a bleak cancer diagnosis, is concurrently dealing with her own mortality and her place in a racist and rapidly crumbling social order from which she has benefitted her entire life.
The very first sentences of the book are written in what seems, at first, to be the second-person perspective. The book is, in fact, written in the first-person, but Coetzee leaves the identity of the person to whom the book is addressed a mystery for the first few pages. The "you" of the first few sentences, and the rest of the book, turns out to be Mrs. Curren's daughter, who has left South Africa in an attempt to divest herself of complicity with the oppressive system of apartheid. She has married an American and started a family of her own. When Curren first shows Vercueil photos of her daughter, she says she has "the look of a woman who has found herself" (31). She continues to ask Vercueil to mail a package of papers and letters to her daughter, but only after she has died. Curren says, "These are private papers, private letters. They are my daughter's inheritance. They are all I can give her, all she will accept, coming from this country. I don't want them opened and read by anyone else" (32).
It is quite pertinent to establishing the framework of the novel that Curren emphasizes her own daughter's journey toward self-actualization in the context of being a white person in South Africa, because the novel is actually about Mrs. Curren "finding herself" after living seventy years, as a white person, in apartheid South Africa. She has benefitted from the social order dictated by apartheid for seventy years, and now, after being diagnosed with a likely terminal disease, and, in the very same hour, meeting Vercueil, Curren is forced to reevaluate her philosophies regarding concepts like charity, race, and social stratification.
Curren seems, from the beginning, already to possess a semi-critical understanding of the "great divide." Though she describes the non-white children as fearsome, "roaming gangs" and "sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison house is already beginning to close," she also recognizes the extreme, sheltered ignorance of white children. Of them, she writes, "their residence [is] the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted" (7).
While Curren still operates from a place of extreme generalization, living in great fear of the subaltern, she recognizes that the upbringing of white children in South Africa is wholly unsustainable. They are larvae soaking in honey, but something can only exist in a larval state for so long. By describing the white childrens' souls as "slumbrous," she recognizes that their souls can barely function as souls, supposedly an instrument of empathy and humanity, because they are asleep and "bliss-filled," ignorant of the oppression necessesary to sustain their easy existences filled with "swimming lessons, riding lessons, ballet lessons ... lives passed within walled gardens guarded by bulldogs" (7).
Coetzee explicitly exposes the cracks in Curren's thoughts regarding the concept of charity in her scene in the yard with Vercueil, after she offers him the job of gardener. Curren tells Vercueil that they "can't proceed on the basis of charity" and Vercueil asks her why. Curren tells Vercueil he doesn't deserve it, and Vercueil says, "Who deserves anything?" (21). This comment really gets under Curren's skin, but she's unable to justify her anger or prove why anyone deserves the lot they've drawn in life. Later that evening, Curren goes on a rant to Vercueil about charity. She says, "Charity: from the Latin word for the heart. It is as hard to receive as to give. It takes as much effort. I wish you would learn that." Immediately after this declaration, Curren admits to the reader that her etymology is a lie. "Charity, caritas," she writes, "has nothing to do with the heart. But what does it matter if my sermons rest on false etymologies?" (22) It is clear, by the end of Part I, that Curren will come to rely on Vercueil, a vagrant she once shouted out of her yard as he slept on a bed of cardboard, more than she could have ever imagined before her cancer diagnosis. It is clear, too, that Curren will begin to understand why it matters that her "sermons rest on false etymologies"—in Age of Iron, Coetzee sets out to prove why the elitist sermons, built on false foundations, are, themselves, false.
