Last December J.M. Coetzee, the South African-turned-Australian author, returned to Cape Town to give a reading. He began by thanking his former colleagues at the university where he had taught; he actually wrote many of his greatest novels longhand in University of Cape Town examination answer booklets. But then, before starting to read, he offered this strange prefatory remark to his new work: “I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus. But in the publishing industry as it is at present, that is not allowed.”

The remark was classic Coetzee: severe, ambitious, darkly humorous, more than a little weird, and fixated almost to the point of parody on frustrating expectations. During the years of apartheid he had established himself as a writer who, while strongly opposed to racial injustice (and glad to write about it in his nonfiction and criticism), rarely conformed to the global literary world’s expectations of an engaged, white South African writer. Unlike Nadine Gordimer, his fellow Nobel laureate, or Breyten Breytenbach, who was imprisoned by the regime, his books did not offer satisfying dissections of the apartheid state’s brutalities; they evaded, experimented, contorted themselves into self-contradictory poses. In this fourth decade of his career, Coetzee has become so resistant to clear or unitary readings of his work that he now doesn’t even want his books to have titles on the covers.

Coetzee’s terse, demanding novels can be imperfectly but helpfully divided into three rough phases. The first, covering the late 1970s and ’80s, consists largely of muscular, unadorned abstract fictions in the mode of Kafka and Beckett, such as Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983). A second, more realist phase in the 1990s began with Age of Iron (1990), his furious and unsparing condemnation of the apartheid state. It continued through to Disgrace (1999), perhaps his most widely read novel, which begins as an almost comic university tale, shifts into something like a traditional South African farm novel, and turns out to be a monstrous rewrite of each. Though these were less allegorical than his earlier books, they were, in political terms, just as spiny. The leadership of South Africa’s governing African National Congress notoriously called Disgrace a “racist” book, and while that’s certainly untrue there’s no single line or character to disprove the accusation, and plenty of sticky material about the country’s post-apartheid troubles.

Since his emigration to Australia in 2002, however, Coetzee’s writing has taken a sharp turn away from realism. In what his biographer J.C. Kannemeyer calls the “Australian” books—others, a little unkindly, call them the “late” books—Coetzee has stretched the boundaries of the novel to the breaking point, largely doing away with narrative progression and concentrating primarily on form and ideas. Elizabeth Costello (2003) takes the shape of eight “lessons,” lectures or public debates delivered by the title character, Coetzee’s female and Australian alter ego. In Slow Man (2005), the title character’s life is interrupted halfway through by the arrival of the very same Elizabeth Costello, who says she is his author. Diary of a Bad Year (2007), an underrated book (and his funniest; he has always been funnier than his austere personality suggests), sees Coetzee divide each page into three horizontal stripes, the top third containing philosophical essays and the bottom two thirds fictional narratives. And Summertime (2009)—officially his third volume of autobiography but, as Kannemeyer demonstrates, almost entirely fictional—takes the form of transcribed interviews between Coetzee’s acquaintances and a biographer writing about “the late John Coetzee.”

There’s no way around it: Australian Coetzee is weird. Yet Coetzee has never published a book as bizarre as The Childhood of Jesus, an unfathomable metafictional firecracker unlike any of his previous books and indeed unlike any other book I can name. The Childhood of Jesus, with a mock-populist title—and that title is indeed on the cover, with the word “Jesus” in giant capital letters; it would not look out of place at an airport bookstore—seems at first to be another “Australian” book. A strange graft of Socratic dialogue, biblical exegesis, socialist realist workers’ play, and road movie, it pares back the fundamentals of fiction; characters are deliberately two-dimensional, settings drawn in only the faintest outlines. Like the other Australian novels, it also places a premium on philosophical and ethical disputes, with sections devoted to the principles of mathematics, the gap between reality and the ideal, and the possibility or desirability of utopia. Humans’ relationships with animals, a major concern in later Coetzee, arises here too in the guise of a horse and a dog.