But these are false notes in an otherwise fine performance. This is a novel rich in subterranean meaning. It's a novel, in part, about reading and writing. As a place name Novilla sounds a lot like the word "novella". David and Simón learn a new language in this new place. Initially Simón feels that the "words lack weight", but by the midpoint of the novel he tells David that in the next life they "may have to learn Chinese". And in the final chapter David, Simón and Inés reach a place called Nueva Esperanza, or New Hope. This movement reflects the novelist's work. The patient mastery of a new language-the language of Novilla, or of this particular novel-moves towards the contemplation of the next.

Coetzee is a moralist, and beneath the surface of The Childhood of Jesus he hides a chilly lesson. David is an imaginative boy growing up in an unimaginative place. He has taught himself to read with a children's edition of Don Quixote. At school he refuses to apply himself and shows a resistance to "the science of numbers". When he invents his own language-a language incomprehensible to others-he's warned he will be "shunned". Before he's taken from home and sent to Punto Arenas, a "special school" for troublesome students, David speaks like a persecuted writer: "Do they want to send me to Punto Arenas because of my stories?" This novel is a parable about the writer's place in a world ruled by cold rationalism. It's a chilly story, like so many of Coetzee's. Yet there is some hope for David, and some warmth in the light of his imagination.