Boyhood

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life is an autobiographical novel by J.M. Coetzee, published in 1997.  Based on his own childhood experiences living in South Africa, it was followed by the sequels Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II and Summertime. All three books were later collected into the single volume Scenes from Provincial Life.

Narrated in the third person, the story begins with a description of the Coetzee family home in Worcester, South Africa when Coetzee was ten years old. The family has moved here from Cape Town, and everything is worse than it was; the family deals with flies and fleas and ants, and the narrator wishes he had a horse in order to go into the veld. His mother instead buys him a bicycle. The bike is too large and heavy for him and his mother decides she will learn to ride it in order to be free, but she cannot find anyone to teach her, and his father mocks her efforts. She attempts to teach herself in their backyard. He joins his father in mocking her and feels guilty. Eventually, she does indeed teach herself to ride, but her father’s mocking resistance continues, and when the bike disappears and she stops riding he knows he is at fault as much as his father, and he is conflicted about being on his father’s side.

He strives to keep his experience at school a secret, and plans to ensure his mother will know nothing of it by getting nothing but good grades and excellent reports on his behavior. At school there is much corporal punishment; all the teachers have canes and use them liberally.



At home he is uncertain as to the status of his father, though he knows in most homes that the father is at the head of the household. He wishes to be his mother’s favorite. He goes camping with the scout troop despite his fears of being away from his mother for so long. He almost drowns attempting to swim across a lake with the other boys. He is saved by a popular, handsome boy named Michael and decides that he survived because he is special.

At school he asserts he is a Roman Catholic despite his family having no real religion, and finds himself left behind during religious assemblies with a few other boys. His choice was random and born out of ignorance, and it marks him as even more of an outsider in school, but he realizes that to change his answer would actually make everything much worse. He seeks out the Catholic Church out of curiosity. His only experience of Jews is through his father’s employer, Wolf Heller, who brought them from Cape Town to Worcester when his father’s career in the civil service failed.

Similarly to his secret love for the Catholic Church, he has a secret love for the Russians despite the events of World War II. Coetzee and his family are Afrikaans, but he has been raised to speak English and thus is considered a minority. He is bullied by his Afrikaaner classmates and experiences prejudice and oppression. One day a young black boy named Eddie, who taught Coetzee to ride a bike, is flogged for a minor sin. Coetzee says nothing and does nothing to save Eddie from the punishment, which is racially motivated, and is haunted by his inaction.



Coetzee comes to despise his father, and believes he would be better off without any father at all. He realizes that while his father seems to have all the qualifications of a great man on paper—he is trained as a lawyer, served as a soldier, and is very athletic—all of these gifts are qualified by failure, as his father never seems to truly succeed in anything.

The circus comes, and Coetzee and his brother wish to attend. His mother cannot afford three tickets, so she buys two for the boys and stands outside in the hot sun while they go in to enjoy the show. He understands this to be a selfless sacrifice born out of love for him, but he finds himself incapable of returning that love to her, instead resenting her.

His aunt Annie suffers a fall. Initially the doctors believed she would recover, but she worsens and finally dies. He resists attending the funeral, vocally complaining that sentimental ceremonies are designed to make everyone feel better, not to honor the dead. He says this more to hurt his smothering mother than out of true belief. He does attend the funeral, and later thinks of his aunt’s collection of books. He asks his mother who will inherit her books. He is concerned that no one aside from Annie has read them, and if he does not also read them and remember them they will be lost forever.