SOURCE: "Places of Pigs: The Tension between Implication and Transcendence in J. M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg," in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, 1996, pp. 83-95.

In the following essay, Marais contrasts relations of power in Age of Iron and The Master of Petersburg.

I

In a recent article on J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Stephen Watson observes that "the bulk of South African literature gives much evidence of that atheism of the imagination which is always conspicuous when a writer has set up barriers between human beings and the crucial questions of existence, such as their very awareness of themselves as spiritual beings". Watson maintains, however, that Coetzee's novels do not exhibit this form of "truncated imagination":

There are times in his recent fiction, particularly The Master of Petersburg, when it really does seem as if the spiritual needs...