Quotes of the Day

the ageing novelist was last seen spouting off about animal rights, eros and the nature of evil at conferences and awards ceremonies, and getting terribly befuddled in the process. "What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs," the novelist said. This was not J.M. Coetzee, the South African now based in South Australia - he was too busy collecting his 2003 Nobel prize for literature - but his pesky character Elizabeth Costello, whose "Eight Lessons" formed the basis of his last "meta" novel. Stranded at the gates of heaven, she was rambling about the Victorian mudflats of her childhood when Elizabeth Costello came to its oblique end.

Well you can't keep a good novelist down, and 79 pages into Coetzee's first book since the Swedish Academy lauded the "icy precision" of his prose, Elizabeth is back, as hot and blustery as the wind off the desert. Until this point, Slow Man (Knopf; 265 pages) has been about the unraveling of retired photographer Paul Rayment in Adelaide. After his bicycle is clipped by a car, he loses first his leg, then his dignity and, perhaps, his mind. Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome brood he offers to support. At which point "the unattractively freckled, somewhat fleshy shoulders" of Elizabeth Costello appear up his stairs. Is she an authorial intervention? A meddling cupid? A cynic about his real intentions with the Jokics, whom she sees as more avaricious than angelic? Or is she the amputee's perfect companion? In Slow Man, she's all of the above, and a wonderful literary conceit to boot. But most of all, she's a refreshingly down-to-earth symbol of that airiest of pursuits - creative writing, which is the real subject of Coetzee's playful novel.

When Elizabeth Costello commands Paul to "push the mortal envelope," he tries to oblige, virtually adopting Marijana's teenage son Drago and rescuing his sister Blanka from a brush with the law. But it's the pull to her push that gives the book its arresting comic edge. Like "scrupulous doubter" Coetzee himself, Paul doesn't totally believe in the merits of his tale: "I am not a hero, Mrs. Costello." The lady, of course, won't have a bar of it. She exhorts Paul to be a fictional hare rather than a tortoise: "Don Quixote is not about a man sitting in a rocking chair bemoaning the dullness of La Mancha. It is about a man who … sallies forth to do great deeds."

Slow Man is not about the doing of great deeds. Coetzee's characters spend too much time questioning their own motives - like Paul, who begins to wonder if his charity towards the Jokics is motivated less by paternalism than by Marijana's shapely legs: "How does love work among the animals? … Are there such things as shapely legs among lady spiders, and does their attractive force puzzle the male spider as it draws him in?" Paul will continue to ask such questions, and like her author's id, Elizabeth Costello will continue to sally forth. In this way, Slow Man is more literary hare than tortoise, showing why Coetzee continues to be fiction's quixotic knight.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• When J.M. Coetzee's female alter ego meets an amputee with time on his hands, meta-sparks fly