J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

'Well,' he says, 'if what you say is true, it is repulsive. It is zoo-keeping, not writing.'

'What would you prefer? A zoo without keepers, where the animals fall into a trance when you stop looking at them? A zoo of ideas? A gorilla cage with the idea of a gorilla in it, an elephant cage with the idea of elephants in it? Do you know how many kilograms of solid waste an elephant drops in twenty-four hours?

If you want a real elephant cage with real elephants then you need a zookeeper to clean up after them.'

'You are off the point, Mother. And don't get so excited.' He turns to the fat woman. 'We are discussing literature, the claims of realism versus the claims of idealism.'

Without ceasing to chew, the fat woman removes her eyes from them. He thinks of the cud of mashed corn and saliva in her mouth and shudders. Where does it all end?

'There is a difference between cleaning up after animals and watching them while they do their business,' he starts again. 'I am asking about the latter, not the former. Don't animals deserve a private life as much as we do?'

'Not if they are in a zoo,' she says. 'Not if they are on show. Once you are on show, you have no private life. Anyway, do you ask permission from the stars before you peek at them through your telescope? What about the private lives of the stars?'

'Mother, the stars are lumps of rock.'

'Are they? I thought they were traces of light millions of years old.'

'Boarding will now commence on United Airlines flight 323 non-stop to Los Angeles,' says a voice above their heads. 'Passengers requiring assistance, as well as families with young children, may step forward.'

On the flight she barely touches her food. She orders two brandies, one after the other, and falls asleep. When, hours later, they begin the descent to Los Angeles, she is still asleep. The flight attendant taps her on the shoulder. 'Ma'am, your seat belt.' She does not stir. They exchange looks, he and the flight attendant. He leans over and clips the belt across her lap.

She lies slumped deep in her seat. Her head is sideways, her mouth open. She is snoring faintly. Light flashes from the windows as they bank, the sun setting brilliantly over southern California. He can see up her nostrils, into her mouth, down the back of her throat. And what he cannot see he can imagine: the gullet, pink and ugly, contracting as it swallows, like a python, drawing things down to the pear-shaped belly-sac. He draws away, tightens his own belt, sits up, facing forward. No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it.

At a dinner party she meets X, whom she has not seen in years. Is he still teaching at the University of Queensland, she asks? No, he replies, he has retired and now works the cruise ships, travelling the world, screening old movies, talking about Bergman and Fellini to retired people. He has never regretted the move. 'The pay is good, you get to see the world, and – do you know what? – people that age actually listen to what you have to say.' He urges her to give it a try: 'You are a prominent figure, a well-known writer. The cruise line I work for will jump at the opportunity to take you on. You will be a feather in their cap. Say but the word and I'll bring it up with my friend the director.'

The proposal interests her. She was last on a ship in 1963, when she came home from England, from the mother country. Soon after that they began to retire the great ocean-going liners, one by one, and scrap them. The end of an era. She would not mind doing it again, going to sea. She would like to call at Easter Island and St Helena, where Napoleon languished. She would like to visit Antarctica – not just to see with her own eyes those vast horizons, that barren waste, but to set foot on the seventh and last continent, feel what it is like to be a living, breathing creature in spaces of inhuman cold.

X is as good as his word. From the headquarters of Scandia Lines in Stockholm comes a fax. In December the SS Northern Lights will be sailing from Christchurch on a fifteen-day cruise to the Ross Ice Shelf, and thence onward to Cape Town. Might she be interested in joining the education and entertainment staff? Passengers on Scandia 's cruise ships are, as the letter puts it,'discriminating persons who take their leisure seriously'. The emphasis of the on-board programme will be on ornithology and cold-water ecology, but Scandia would be delighted if the noted writer Elizabeth Costello could find the time to offer a short course on, say, the contemporary novel. In return for which, and for making herself accessible to passengers, she will be offered an A-class berth, all expenses paid, with air connections to Christchurch and from Cape Town, and a substantial honorarium to boot.

It is an offer she cannot refuse. On the morning of 10 December she joins the ship in Christchurch harbour. Her cabin, she finds, is small but otherwise quite satisfactory; the young man who coordinates the entertainment and self-development programme is respectful; the passengers at her table at lunchtime, in the main retired people, people of her own generation, are pleasant and unostentatious.

On the list of her co-lecturers there is only one name she recognizes: Emmanuel Egudu, a writer from Nigeria. Their acquaintance goes back more years than she cares to remember, to a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur. Egudu had been loud and fiery then, political; her first impression was that he was a poseur. Reading him later on, she had not changed her mind. But a poseur, she now wonders: what is that? Someone who seems to be what he is not? Which of us is what he seems to be, she seems to be? And anyway, in Africa things may be different. In Africa what one takes to be posing, what one takes to be boasting, may just be manliness. Who is she to say?

Towards men, including Egudu, she has, she notices, mellowed as she has grown older. Curious, because in other respects she has become more (she chooses the word carefully) acidulous.

She runs into Egudu at the captain's cocktail party (he has come aboard late). He is wearing a vivid green dashiki, suave Italian shoes; his beard is spotted with grey, but he is still a fine figure of a man. He gives her a huge smile, enfolds her in an embrace. ' Elizabeth!' he exclaims. 'How good to see you! I had no idea! We have so much catching up to do!'

In his lexicon, it appears, catching up means talking about his own activities. He no longer spends much time in his home country, he informs her. He has become, as he puts it, 'an habitual exile, like an habitual criminal'. He has acquired American papers; he makes his living on the lecture circuit, a circuit that would appear to have expanded to encompass the cruise ships. This will be his third trip on the Northern Lights. Very restful, he finds it; very relaxing. Who would have guessed, he says, that a country boy from Africa would end up like this, in the lap of luxury? And he treats her again to his big smile, the special one.

I'm a country girl myself, she would like to say, but does not, though it is true, in part. Nothing exceptional about being from the country.

Each of the entertainment staff is expected to give a short public talk. 'Just to say who you are, where you come from,' explains the young coordinator in carefully idiomatic English. His name is Mikael; he is handsome in his tall, blond, Swedish way, but dour, too dour for her taste.

Her talk is advertised as 'The Future of the Novel', Egudu's as 'The Novel in Africa '. She is scheduled to speak on the morning of their first day out to sea; he will speak the same afternoon. In the evening comes 'The Lives of Whales', with sound recordings.

Mikael himself does the introduction. 'The famous Australian writer,' he calls her, 'author of The House on Eccles Street and many other novels, whom we are truly privileged to have in our midst.' It vexes her to be billed once again as the author of a book from so far in the past, but there is nothing to be done about that.