AustLit

'J. M. Coetzee’s fourth Australian novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) has all signs of a realistic refugee novel with its use of simple language, lucid plotline and stock characters. But it is another of Coetzee’s postmodern projects with its striking contingent of metafictional devices. This essay uses Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern and attends to three metafictional details in the novel——the naming of Novilla, the boy protagonist’s handover to an alleged mother, and his "magical cloak of invisibility"——to delve into Coetzee’s allusive representation of the experience of displacement of two refugees, Simon and particularly David. It is contended that The Childhood of Jesus, through a postmodern representation of the double traumas of a child refugee who has lost his home and loved ones in war, constitutes a testament to Coetzee’s penetrating engagement with the global refugee problem in the 21st century.'

Source: CAOD database.