The Childhood of Jesus

by J. M. Coetzee
As the sequel to this book is on the Booker longlist I thought I had better read this first.
It is a strange tale where nothing is quite what it seems. The story is not about the biblical Jesus.
It is set in the 20th century but we are never told when. They have telephones but not mobiles. They have cars but they still use horses at the docks where Simon works. They speak Spanish but they are not in Spain. They have arrived from somehere by boat but we do not know where. On the way nearly all there memories have been erased but we do not know why.
The central characters are a young boy called David(or is he) and a middle aged man called Simon who has taken him under his wing on the boat with a promise to help him find his mother.
The book asks lots of questions about family ties and what is a father/mother? It offers no answers. The little boy is very irritating at times and the story has no satisfactory conclusion.
All that said, it is a tribute to Coetzee's storytelling that you get carried along with ease, and although I ended the book with more questions than I started I enjoyed the ride. 8/10