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J M Coetzee is about the most distinguished novelist now writing in the English language, having won the Nobel, and the Booker twice. The Schooldays of Jesus has been longlisted for this year’s upcoming Man Booker Prize too. So we have every reason to give it full attention, even if it seems baffling.

In 2013 Coetzee published a novel, narrated like this one in the present tense, set in no identifiable time or place, The Childhood of Jesus. A man called Simón, 45 or so, arrives, with no memory of his past, as a refugee in a Spanish-speaking country, along with a strange, inspired five-year-old boy called David whom he has met on the boat and to whom he is not related.

Simon takes it upon himself to look after David and to search for his mother — whom he weirdly identifies in the form of Inés, a woman he sees playing tennis. Although she is not actually related to David either, Inés accepts the position and, together with her Alsatian dog Bolivar, they form a peculiar family.

David runs into trouble with the education authorities. When told by a schoolmaster to write “I must tell the truth” on the blackboard he writes instead “Yo soy la verdad. I am the truth” (cf. John. 14.6). When he is sent to a residential reformatory he escapes — and the family set off secretly for a new life in another town, Estrellita, little star.

Throughout, the novel alludes to the Bible (Jesus was of the House of David). As it happens, there is not much in the gospels about the childhood of Jesus, although of course Jesus himself does say: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become as little children, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”

Reviewing the novel, I found it elusive despite its beauty and even wondered if the famously unforthcoming Coetzee (76 now) might explain. Some hope! What Coetzee actually said at an early reading in Cape Town was: “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 Schooldays of Jesus picks up exactly where the previous novel left off and is written in precisely the same way, using a lot of dialogue, seeing the story from the point of view of the dedicated but uncomprehending Simón.

They arrive in Estrella (as it now is) and initially take refuge as casual workers on a fruit farm. But David needs some education. An initial attempt at private tutoring in maths fails: David impertinently insists that he knows all the numbers while the tutor suggests “he is deficient in a certain basic mental capacity, in this case the capacity to classify objects on the basis of similarity”.

Instead, the three kindly elderly sisters who own the fruit farm pay for David to attend a private Academy of Dance, run by a charismatic beauty, Ana Magdalena Arroyo (Spanish for an intermittently dry creek!). There, mystically, the pupils learn to dance noble numbers, numbers from the stars. “Our academy is dedicated to guiding the souls of our students towards that realm, to bringing them in accord with the great underlying movement of the universe, or, as we prefer to say, the dance of the universe,” says señora Arroyo. David, usually disruptive, obeys her and becomes the best dancer at the school. He feels he is recognised there as he is not by his own family.

However, señora Arroyo has a dangerous admirer, the museum guard Dmitri, a rough Russian in his forties (an assistant at the school is called Alyosha, both Brothers Karamazov, as it were, then). Dmitri inexplicably strangles the woman he loves and accepts his guilt and condemnation. He keeps saying he does not know why he did it but David insists he does understand, and he helps Dmitri escape the hospital to which he is sent.

Dmitri embraces him and whispers in his ear, David nodding vigorously. To Simón, though, Dmitri says: “Don’t believe everything I say. It is just air, air that blows where it listeth.” John 3:8, then: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

In the next verse of the Gospel, Nicodemus asks: “How can these things be?” That’s just what the reader of The Schooldays of Jesus asks himself too. The novel ends with Simón humbly trying to learn to dance himself: “Over the horizon the first star begins to rise.” You realise with surprise that this book has taken the story on only a year or so, to David’s seventh birthday and so in all likelihood it is far from finished.

On one level you can take this as an attempt to imagine the scarcely imaginable: what it would be like to become the parents and educators of a divine child, the young Jesus.

David says quite clearly that he is always good, he is not human, he is nobody’s son and he wants to be a lifesaver. Yet although it is written with the coolness and limpidity that make Coetzee such a master, the story remains almost uninterpretable, certainly no simple allegory, quite an achievement in itself. Frustrating, yes, but not just that. There were moments when I found it almost too affecting to read without pausing to recover myself.