Disgrace is a deeply disturbing book. It is not an easy read. A novel of despair, it is set in a world where “one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be, grows harder yet.” Yet for all its random violence, fractured relationships and sense of loss, Disgrace is also a powerful, honest novel, and one that deserves attention.

David Lurie, a 53-year-old professor of Romantic poetry at a Cape Town University, has fallen into disgrace. After embarking on an affair with one of his young student, he is found out, publicly condemned, and forced to resign from his position. ‘Affair’ is too generous a word for the exploitative relationship Lurie pursues with a young girl more than half his age. Even Lurie admits his sexual encounters with her are, “not rape, not quite like that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core”.

Lurie is not sorry for the pain he has caused the girl or her family. Rather, he tells the girl’s father, “She struck up a fire in me.” His apology is hollow. “There was something I failed to supply,” he admits, “something lyrical. Even when I burn I don’t sing ... for which I am sorry.”

In front of a university disciplinary board, he refuses to undertake counselling or to express contrition for his actions. “I have not sought counselling, nor do I intend to seek it,” Lurie insists. “Frankly, what you want from me is not a response but a confession. Well I make no confession. I became a servant of Eros,” he concludes.

Later he again deliberately emphasises his lack of repentance. “Before (a) secular tribunal I pleaded guilty. That plea should suffice. Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of discourse.”

But what is the outcome for a man who lives in a world he calls, “post-Christian, post historical, post literate”?

Lurie is condemned to a life of solitude and isolation from others.“I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself,” he says. “It is not a punishment I have refused. Is it enough for God, do you think, that I live in disgrace without term?”

But disgrace for Lurie turns quickly into a life of chaos, horror and greater suffering. For Lurie lives in post-apartheid South Africa, and he serves out his term on his daughter Lucy’s remote farm in the Eastern Cape. There, he and Lucy become the victims of a terrifying and savage attack, in which the farm is ransacked and Lucy is raped repeatedly by three black strangers.

Lurie is locked in a toilet, and he is powerless to save his daughter. He is horrified at what the men have done to her. “They put her in her place… they showed her what a woman is for,” he tells himself as he watches her degenerate into an unkempt, isolated figure.

He is particularly enraged with Petrus, a black neighbour who owns his own land. Petrus, once Lucy’s labourer and “dog-man,” shelters one of the very men who raped Lucy and makes no attempt to bring the rapist to justice. Lurie demands that justice be done. He wants Petrus to admit the rape was, “a violation… an outrage.”

In a moving scene, Lurie sits by his daughter’s bed all night. “What is he doing?” he asks of himself. “He is watching over his little girl, guarding her from harm, warding off the bad spirits.” But Lurie himself is “a bad spirit”. He too is guilty of violating a woman, and although he seeks justice for his own daughter, he fails to understand or recognise the damage he has done to his former student. Nor does he understand the demands made by her father for justice.

And justice will not come for Lurie in the new South Africa. Coetzee paints a frightening picture of a country in chaos, where police are powerless to act, and violence is a way of life. Lurie’s situation becomes an allegory for whites in the new South Africa. He realises that he and Lucy are lucky to have escaped the attack with their lives. It is a risk to own anything. “Not enough to go around…Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant.”

It becomes clear that Lucy’s days as a white woman managing a small, isolated farm are numbered. That is unless she seeks refuge with the very figure who failed to prevent her rape. Petrus. Lucy sends her father to negotiate an alliance in the form of marriage to Petrus.

Not surprisingly, Lurie is appalled at his daughter’s decision.

“I agree it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start,” she says. “Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level, with nothing…. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity… Like a dog.”

Disgrace brilliantly turns the tables, putting white South Africans in the same position of subservience that apartheid forced on black South Africans.

But ultimately Disgrace is a novel without hope. There is a resigned acceptance of a universe that is both random and terrifying. There is guilt without repentance, punishment without mercy, and life without hope. And so Disgrace is an honest book about a world that has passed God by; a world that exists without acknowledging God, without any hope for meaning, beauty or redemption.