Youth J M Coetzee Secker & Warburg, 180pp, £14.99 ISBN 0436205823

Dan Jacobson once wrote about his first few weeks in London in a wonderful essay titled "Time of Arrival". He had grown up in a diamond-mining town in South Africa, and his journey to Britain in 1950 was part of the hopeful migration from the colonies to the imperial metropolis, which, though badly battered by the Second World War, had not lost its promise of professional and emotional fulfilment in the eyes of colonial dreamers everywhere. Like most colonials growing aware simultaneously of the glories of English literature and of the inadequacies of the world around them, Jacobson had embraced early in his life the idea of London as redemption from colonial narrowness. This fantasy was usually more ambitious - and vague - than the 19th-century French provincial's longing for Paris; it was complicated further by racial and religious separateness. In "Time of Arrival", Jacobson recalled how he had expected his mere presence in London somehow to dissolve the "ironies, humiliations and ambiguities" of his "position as a Jew, as a white South African and as a young man who didn't know what to do with his life".

Much of post-colonial literature in the days before globalisation contained these intense expectations. Fulfilment, however, came only to a few, and required a great deal of hard work and luck. First, there were deprivations - material, emotional, sexual - to be undergone. There were also less obvious setbacks and disappointments: during Jacobson's first few weeks in Bloomsbury, the optimistic images of the former bohemian haunt and of himself in London were both beginning to dissolve. "So this was it. I had seen it . . . Coming to London had not - not yet, at any rate - changed me, transformed me, made a new man of me. Bloomsbury was what it had been before I had seen it. So was I."

In 1962, the year in which Jacobson published his memoir, J M Coetzee arrived in London. Apartheid had been part of life in South Africa throughout the 1950s, following its introduction as official policy in 1948. In 1960, when Coetzee was a student in Johannesburg, South African police massacred black protesters in the town of Sharpeville. Compared with previous South African immigrants, Coetzee probably carried a heavier burden of fear, revulsion and hopes to London. It is also what weighs upon the main protagonist of Youth, a young mathematician called John, who travels to London determined to shake off the "dust of ugly new South Africa", to flee, above all, the "atrophy of the moral life"

At university in Johannesburg, Coetzee's character has read Ezra Pound as part of his preparation for the rich life awaiting him in London. He has also read Flaubert, who makes him want to go to bed with Emma Bovary. This makes him suspect that, despite his reading, there is "something rotten" in his sensibility. And sensibility is all-important to John: because he wants to burn, like many others before him, with a Pateresque, hard, gem-like flame; live life as he expects artists in the past have, with passion and anguish; and then transmute the experience into art.

But life in England of the 1960s turns out to be mean. John's ambition to create a new character for himself remains unfulfilled. He drifts in and out of his job as a computer programmer at IBM. He dreams of Monica Vitti, but his search for sexual bliss peters out into a series of unsatisfying affairs. His literary ambitions go no further than such unfortunate lines of verse as "the waves of incontinence". After a brief infatuation, he grows indifferent to Henry James, "who wants one to believe that conversations, exchanges of words, are all that matters". He decides that the novel of manners is not for him. He also gives up on Ford Madox Ford, after struggling with one of his more unreadable novels. He suffers the usual confusions about art: how is it made? Does one have to live first? What about women and sex? Do they hinder or encourage the artist?

There are no answers in Youth that do not immediately lead to fresh questions. Those who found Disgrace bleak are likely to draw even less comfort from Youth. The temptation here might be to dismiss John as a bore, and to defuse his self-doubts by tracing them back to Coetzee's own youth. After all, it seems axiomatic that the personal insecurities we read about have been resolved - to some degree at least - by success, however delayed or hard-fought. Otherwise, how could they be written about? Certainly, there is much relief to be had in turning away from John's desolation and looking at Coetzee's career, where literary ambition, no matter how confused or neurotic initially, has been brilliantly fulfilled. It becomes possible, then, to see John's inconsequential literary wanderings as playing out a search for a literary form that a homeless white South African, as much as the post-colonial Indian or black South African, is forced into - a problem that Coetzee once again seems to have dealt with. Youth does begin to appear a surrender to nostalgia, the kind of thinly fictionalised memoir of long-surmounted bitterness that well-feted novelists are prone to write in comfortable middle age.

Coetzee, however, is not content simply to empty out an old drawer of experience. His cold, dry prose alone seems to rule out a voluptuous embrace of early deprivations. In any case, the aspiring writer in John is aware that "he may have his own vision of London, but there is nothing unique to that vision". What seems to preoccupy John - and his creator - is the idea, which is expressed early in the book, when John is still a student in South Africa, and which continues to lurk in all his artistic and sexual ambitions, that "things are rarely as they seem". It is what John wants to tell his estranged lover, who has found herself described as a burden in his private diary. Because he is not sure if his diary reflects his true feelings, or whether it contains "a fiction, one of the many possible fictions, true only in the sense that a work of art is true".

A few years ago, Coetzee raised similar doubts about the kind of secular self-revelation pioneered by Montaigne and Rousseau, in a long essay titled "Confession and Double Thoughts". According to him, such confessions rarely questioned their own motives and assumptions, or the element of self-interest that lurked behind them. They seemed to him to be unaware of the potentially endless nature of self-consciousness, or of what may be the same thing: self-deception.

Coetzee claimed to find a more complex psychology in the fictions of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. His own recent novels have seemed Dostoevskian in their obsessive suspicion that we feel only what we imagine we feel. It is a suspicion that takes Disgrace and Youth far from both the self-satisfied record of sensibility, and the social and psychological dramas adorned with "beautiful writing" or notions thereof, whose sheer multiplicity and repetitiveness give the contemporary novel its sickly pallor.

Nevertheless, the effort to rescue the novel from spiritual retardation is not without difficulties, and not just for the kind of reader who craves the artificial tensions of plot and "strong" characters. Coetzee's novelistic technique seems impeccable - more polished indeed than Dostoevsky's - but the philosophical concerns that give his prose its urgency (and a profusion of interrogative sentences) also strip it of even the traces of any consoling sensuousness. Besides, the novel needs stable objects and, to a certain extent, stable characters to achieve even its very provisional truths. A destabilised self finally contemplates nothing but itself; and its preoccupations, as often random as they are profound, are barely contained by the form of the novel.

These are problems the novelist solves in his own way. For Dostoevsky, the radical impasse of self-consciousness opened out into religion. But grace doesn't seem a possibility in Coetzee's secularised world and characters. Youth ends with John in a new job in Cambridge, at the beginning of an awkward and unlikely friendship with an Indian computer programmer called Ganapathy, but still drifting, self-knowledge as elusive as ever, and feeling himself "cold, frozen". The last sentences speak stoically of death. "One of these days the ambulance men will call at Ganapathy's flat and bring him out on a stretcher with a sheet over his face. When they have fetched Ganapathy they might as well come and fetch him too." At first, this is startling, and seems slightly melodramatic. But soon, no other ending looks appropriate for this oddly compassionate book. It is as if, with the self rendered unknowable, there remains only flesh: the body, with its clear, sharp urges and pains, always replete with the certainties of decay and extinction.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics (Picador £6.99)

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