There is just a hint of Beckettian allegory behind the realism. Paul’s symbolic emasculation and his immobility are accompanied by an awareness of the physical world closing in. On this level, Slow Man begins as a novel about the tribulations of ageing; more specifically, it sets out to explore the psychology of an ageing male sexuality. This theme has made a notable appearance in Coetzee’s previous work. In Disgrace (1999), the university professor David Lurie – like Paul Rayment a gentleman of a certain age – believes he has ‘solved the problem of sex rather well’, only to embark upon an ill-judged affair with a student, which destroys his career. In Slow Man, the emphasis is on Paul’s underlying frustration, the quiet desperation behind which we might detect the unappeasable spectre of death, and the way this dimly understood anxiety can lead a man to act foolishly. There is a sense in which Paul’s awkward sexuality becomes an expression of a kind of absurdism: a longing for connection and release that only serves to underscore his inevitable isolation and decline. Coetzee’s debt to Samuel Beckett has often been noted; I believe it was Beckett who observed that a man’s sexual longing never really goes away, it just becomes less and less appropriate.

Curiously, the first third of Slow Man turns out to be something of a red herring. There is the subtlest hint of what is to come when Paul, divorced and childless, reflects on a life that now feels to him like a missed opportunity. ‘If none is left to pass judgement on such a life,’ he thinks, ‘if the Great Judge of All has given up judging and withdrawn to pare his nails, then he will pronounce it himself: A wasted chance.’ The clue is in the line’s allusion to James Joyce. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Joyce’s fictional alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, argues that the artist, ‘like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’. As high-literary allusions tend to do, this knowing echo points to the tension between the novel’s realism and its carefully crafted formality. Paul’s suggestion that there is no overarching moral purpose to his life paradoxically draws attention to the very thing it is denying: the fact that his fate is in the hands of an invisible, controlling, authorial power. However purposeless his existence may feel, the narrative of his life is unavoidably encumbered with significance.

The definitive rupture in Paul’s narrative occurs with the appearance on his doorstep of Elizabeth Costello, the heroine of Coetzee’s previous novel. Admirers of Elizabeth Costello (2003) will recall that its title character is an elderly writer whose most famous book, The House on Eccles Street, is a reworking of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Her forceful personality swiftly imposes itself upon Paul. Though they have not met previously, she seems to know a great deal about him already. She begins explaining his thoughts and feelings to him as if she knows him better than he knows himself. She badgers him about being lacklustre and uninteresting. She appropriates Paul’s story, demanding he take action to give his life a more purposeful and dramatic shape.

‘The Costello woman’, as Paul comes to think of her, is not simply a disruptive influence in Paul’s life; she tears up the fabric of the novel. Her overbearing presence gives Slow Man a metafictional jolt that affects its entire structure. The novel ceases to be fiction and becomes, suddenly, many fictions. The writing itself becomes more overtly ‘literary’, as all the potentially meaningful, symbolic elements of the narrative, which were previously submerged, are dragged to the surface. In one strange and fascinating scene, stage-man­ aged by Costello, Paul is visited by a blind woman named Marianna. The scene is full of allusions, particularly to Shakespeare: Marianna not only represents a Shakespearean doubling of Marijana, her name and her narrative function are an obvious reference to the character of Mariana in Measure for Measure. Costello’s purpose in bringing the couple together is seemingly to draw out correspondences and create symbolic moments that make Paul’s life more comprehensible and thus push along his sense of self-awareness. She has, in effect, come uninvited into Paul’s life to give him the moral structure that he felt was lacking. This, she argues, is something literature provides. ‘Nothing that happens in our lives is without a meaning, Paul,’ she says, ‘as any child can tell you. That is one of the lessons stories teach us, one of the many lessons.’

Elizabeth Costello is right in a sense. As any literary critic can tell you, nothing happens in a story that is not meaningful. There are no accidents in fiction; if a detail is mentioned, however inconsequential it may seem, it is axiomatic that it is mentioned for a reason. But it is in this way that fiction is not like life, which is experienced as a flow of irrelevant detail. The transubstantiation of shapeless existence into narrative is the overriding subject of Slow Man, and the motivation behind the sometimes heavy-handed metafictional games it plays. The name of God is often invoked in the novel, but read through a Joycean lens this is a God conflated with the idea of the creating, controlling author. There is a religious – or rather quasi-religious – aspect to narrative. It shapes experience and gives it purpose, but it also falsifies reality in the process. The archetypal patterns and echoes, which are an inevitable part of any narrative, are seen to be a symptom of the existential dilemma of being a rational creature in an irrational universe.

Slow Man is a compelling but occasionally ungainly attempt to confront this paradox in the way we understand the world. The question is one of authority, in every sense: the fact that meaning is something created. Paul has a collection of historical photographs, which he treasures as an authentic record, an embodiment of the past. ‘The camera, with its power of taking in light and turning it into substance,’ we are told, ‘has always seemed to him more a metaphysical than a mechanical device.’ But the novel also suggests there is something illusory about this belief in authenticity. Paul is horrified when Marijana’s son, Drago, alters one of his precious images using a computer. Marijana, however, is less concerned. ‘Original is copy already,’ she shrugs. ‘Each becomes a new thing, a new real, new in the world, a new original.’

Metafiction is, ultimately, a snake that swallows its own tail. Recently, however, the American novelist David Foster Wallace has pursued the connection between metafiction and metaphysics with an Ahab-like intensity that, through its sheer intellectual energy, begins to crack the artifice and reveal the despairing human subject beneath. Wallace’s garrulous style is drastically unlike Coetzee’s austere fiction, but there is a thematic affinity evident in Elizabeth Costello and, now, Slow Man. Elizabeth Costello defines writing as ‘second thoughts to the power of n’. The act of writing, in other words, is a form of self-awareness that admits no final resting point. The logic of narrative must constantly undermine its own order if it is to retain its capacity to examine the human condition.

The manner in which these ideas are explored in Slow Man is lugubriously ironic. There is an argument running through the novel between Paul and Elizabeth Costello about genre. Costello insists that Paul’s life is a comedy. ‘Losing any part of the body that sticks out,’ she asserts, ‘is comic.’ Of course, she gets her way in the end. It is even implied, as the novel approaches its resolution, that the entire exercise has been a joke at Paul’s expense. Costello cautions him about taking everything so seriously. When she delivers a passionate speech urging Paul to live more like a hero, she advises him to sally forth courageously like Don Quixote. It is an odd choice of role model: Quixote is, after all, insane. Later, when Paul, in a Freudian moment, suggests that jokes have a relationship to the unconscious, Costello replies in kind that ‘sometimes a joke is just a joke’.

There is something parodic about Elizabeth Costello’s moralising, which is heavily ironised by the book’s multi­layered structure. Elizabeth Costello attracted some criticism for being under-fictionalised, the suggestion being that the title character was a vehicle for Coetzee’s opinions which allowed him to evade moral responsibility. It would be a brave critic to so casually conflate Coetzee and Costello after reading Slow Man. In a sense, this consciously over­fictionalised novel might be read as a retort to those critics: a reminder that the morality of fiction is itself ironic.

When a novel begins drawing attention to its fictional qualities, openly discussing philosophical questions about representative art, and canvassing the options for its own resolution, it is often at the price of a certain formal awkwardness. Slow Man is a flawed novel, but one that is fascinatingly flawed. It is a work that has been deliberately and calmly disfigured by its creator as a way of exploring the ethics of its own narrative practices. For there is, significantly, another level to Slow Man. ‘Silence can be full of meaning,’ as Paul tells Marijana, and there is a telling silence at the heart of the novel. Ultimately, it is necessary to take a step back and remind ourselves that the author of Paul Rayment’s fate is not Elizabeth Costello but J.M. Coetzee, who is everywhere and nowhere in this book. He is, like the God of creation, refined out of existence, invisible, paring his fingernails.