When was the last time a novel’s conclusion moved you? A parting shot so visceral there is no helping the upsurge of feeling it demands. I was last affected in such a way by John Williams’ Stoner in the late 2010s. Now, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace can take its place on the mantle.

It is a tough novel in many ways, although readability is not one of them. At a cool 220 pages it encapsulates its story with ease — Coetzee has the gift of the novelist who can bear weighty subjects on the lightest of written touches. David Lurie, a professor in Cape Town, South Africa pursues Melanie, one of his students, into a coerced affair. She eventually reports Lurie to university authorities. Rather than repent, Lurie accepts her accusations without hearing them in detail, pleads guilty to the charge of “passion”, loses his professorship, and kicks off a firestorm in the local media. He retreats to his daughter Lucy’s rural home in search of reprieve, but life in the new South Africa’s rural lands has its own dangers.

Through the book run charged undercurrents: shadows of apartheid, critiques of pseudo-legal entities (the Truth & Reconciliation Commission is not named, but hinted at), the tenuous relationship between those once routinely brutalized now made free and equal to their brutalizers, animal rights, “desire”, and sexual abuse. All have their role to play in stitching together a sort of encompassing view of a society lurching in a new direction through the narrow point of view of one man. A man who, by his own admission, isn’t particularly amenable to changing his ways. When the rules change, he refuses to change with them. Does that make him, with all his prejudices and (self-justified) presumptions of superiority over others, evil? Or is he now a walking talking relic out of time, waiting for the grave to claim him — a shambling reminder that history walks among us? His fate, like those of all the characters, is left in the air although we never for a moment think anyone’s tale will come to a happy ending. They almost never do.