David Lurie is a middle-aged professor in Cape Town, South Africa. Although he used to teach Classics and Modern Languages, he’s now an adjunct professor of Communications, which means he doesn’t care about the topic he teaches. However, he’s still allowed to conduct one course of his own choosing, so he leads a class on Romantic poetry, though even this hardly gives him satisfaction. He has other ways of attaining pleasure, though, like visiting a prostitute named Soraya every Thursday night. After having been married twice, he likes Soraya’s straightforward company, which is contained to one night at a time. His dynamic with her soon changes after he accidentally encounters her and her two sons in public, an experience that introduces a strange element to their transactional relationship. The next time he visits, she tells him she’s leaving the brothel to take care of her ailing mother, and when he calls her several weeks later after tracking down her phone number, she yells at him for “harassing” her and “demands” that he never speak to her again.
Around this time, David is walking on campus when he comes upon Melanie Isaacs, a beautiful twenty-year-old student who is in his Romantic poetry class. Catching up to her, he invites her to his apartment, where he offers her wine and dinner. Throughout the evening, Melanie is tense and jumpy. Despite this, David tries to make her feel comfortable, and though it’s obvious she wants to leave, he asks her to stay the night. In response, she asks why she should do this, and he tells her that beautiful women have a “duty” to share their beauty with others, though this argument is unsuccessful and she soon leaves. However, he takes her to lunch several days later, and afterwards he drives her to his apartment and has sex with her on his living room floor, noticing that she simply lies beneath him in a passive manner—something that doesn’t actually bother him. As David’s affair with Melanie proceeds, she begins to withdraw from him even more, and her attendance in class suffers as a result. Because of their involvement, though, he marks her as present. He also continues to pursue her, attending one of her theater rehearsals and even showing up at her apartment unannounced one evening and throwing himself on her, taking her in his arms and moving toward the bedroom even as she tells him to stop because her roommate will be home soon. In the bedroom, he takes off her clothes, and she helps by lifting her hips when he slides off her pants. This, however, doesn’t mean she’s any more responsive than the first time they have sex. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core,” Coetzee writes. The following day, she misses class again and, thus, misses the midterm exam, but David gives her a 70% anyway.
The following weekend, Melanie appears at David’s apartment and asks if she can stay. It seems she’s quite upset about something, so he prepares a bed for her in his daughter’s old room and lets her sleep. The next morning, he goes into the bedroom and asks what’s wrong, and she says she needs to stay with him for a little while. Against his better judgment, he agrees. The next day, they have sex one last time. Then, that afternoon, a young man named Ryan comes to David’s office and threatens him, telling him to stay away from Melanie. That night, David’s car is vandalized. After this, Melanie stops coming to David’s apartment, though she comes to class one day with Ryan, who sits beside her and looks challengingly at David as he lectures. After class, he tells Melanie she will need to take the midterm the following Monday, but when the day comes, he finds a notice in his faculty mailbox informing him that Melanie has withdrawn from his class.
From this point on, things move quickly. Melanie’s father calls David and asks him to convince her to stay in school, since she has always “respected” him. However, Mr. Isaacs soon finds out what really happened, at which point Melanie files a sexual harassment complaint. In David’s hearing, the disciplinary committee gives him a chance to present his side of the story, but he simply pleads guilty to whatever Melanie has said. Since he hasn’t even looked at the allegations, though, the committee members find his behavior confrontational and arrogant, ultimately urging him to issue a statement of genuine regret, which he’s unwilling to do. As such, he’s forced to resign from the university.
After his resignation, David goes to the Eastern Cape to visit his daughter Lucy, who lives on a farm. For the past several years, Lucy has been farming with her partner, Helen, but Helen has recently left, so she’s on her own except for a man named Petrus, who works for her but is about to become an owner of the stretch of her land that he lives on. Having heard only a little about David’s troubles in Cape Town, Lucy doesn’t press him for details, instead telling him he can stay as long as he’d like and urging him to see her hospitality as “refuge.” He, for his part, plans to work on an opera project about the poet Lord Byron, though he has trouble getting started. To pass the time, he helps out with the dog kennel Lucy runs on her property, sometimes working alongside Petrus. He also helps Lucy sell her goods at a farmer’s market and meets her friends, Bev and Bill Shaw, both of whom he finds excessively plain and unattractive, two things he holds against them. However, because he’s bored, he decides to volunteer at the Animal Welfare League, where Bev Shaw treats injured animals and—more often than not—puts them down.
On a walk one evening, David and Lucy pass three men they don’t recognize. When they get back to the farm they find these ominous strangers, who claim they need to use the telephone because one of their sisters is giving birth. Lucy reluctantly lets two of them in, and David realizes within minutes that something is amiss, but he can’t do anything because the strangers have locked Lucy—and themselves—in the house. When he forces his way inside, they hit him over the head, drag him to the bathroom, and lock him in there. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t break down the door, so he calls Lucy’s name and feels helpless. Through the window, he watches the men walk outside with Lucy’s rifle and shoot the dogs in the outdoor kennel, killing all but one, a small bulldog named Katy. After what seems a long time, the door opens and the men douse him in flammable liquid before dropping a match on him. Suddenly, he feels and sees flames jump up from his body, and he rushes back into the bathroom and splashes the fire out with toilet water, at which point the attackers lock him inside once more. With their arms full of various appliances, the three men get into David’s car and drive away.
After the attack, Lucy lets David out. She’s wearing a bathrobe, her hair is wet, and she refuses to talk about what happened, though it’s obvious the men raped her. Telling him she’s going to walk to her neighbor Ettinger’s house, she asks him to “stick to [his] own story” when talking about what happened. She then leaves and returns with Ettinger in his truck, and Ettinger takes David to the hospital, dropping him off to get his burns treated. When David emerges hours later, he discovers that Bill Shaw has been waiting for him, not Lucy. Surprised that Bill would wait for him despite hardly knowing him, he’s shocked to hear Bill say, “What else are friends for?”
In the coming weeks, David is bothered that Petrus was nowhere to be seen during the attack. David learns that he was conveniently out of town. When he returns, though, David can’t get any information out of him, which makes him suspicious. During this period, Petrus has a party to celebrate his new ownership of part of Lucy’s land. At this party, David and Lucy see one of the three attackers, a young boy named Pollux. As David advances upon him and threatens to call the police, Petrus comes between them and discourages him from taking action. Later, in the house, Lucy also tells her father not to call the authorities, and though he once again tries to talk to her about what happened, she refuses to discuss the matter.
Sensing that he and Lucy have been together too long, David returns to Cape Town, though first he makes a stop in Melanie’s home town, where he visits Mr. Isaacs at work. Although he’s surprised to see him, Isaacs is open to talking to David and invites him over for dinner that night. Throughout the evening, Melanie’s mother and sister are tense, but Mr. Isaacs treats David with kindness. After his wife and daughter retreat into another part of the house, though, Isaacs tries to understand why David has come, ultimately urging him to make peace with God about what he’s done. Frustrated by this unexpected moral attack, David rushes into the back of the house, finds Melanie’s mother and sister sitting on a bed, and kneels before them, putting his head to the floor in a display of repentance.
Back in Cape Town, David discovers that his apartment has been broken into. Restlessly, he tries to work on his opera project, but he decides to return to Lucy’s house because Bev hints over the phone that something has happened. Upon his return, Lucy tells him she’s pregnant and that the baby inevitably belongs to one of her rapists. What’s more, she’s decided not to get an abortion, since she’s already had one in her life and doesn’t want to go through it again. All of this is news to David, who thinks his daughter his making the wrong choice but knows he has no say in the matter. Worse, though, Lucy tells him that Pollux—whom she claims has certain cognitive challenges—has moved in with Petrus. Still, though, she refuses to leave. This deeply upsets David, so much that he completely loses his temper when he sees Pollux spying on Lucy through a window several days later. Knowing right away that Pollux is watching her dress, he lets Katy maul the young man while he himself kicks him and screams terrible things at him, suggesting that he’s an inferior “swine.” Hearing this commotion, Lucy runs out and comes to Pollux’s aid, but as she does so, her top slides down, exposing her breasts. When she turns away to fix this, Pollux jumps up and walks away, screaming that he will kill them.
Because of this outbreak, Lucy indicates that she wants David to move out. Knowing he has only made things worse for his daughter, then, David moves to a hotel, resigning himself to working at the animal shelter with Bev Shaw and waiting for Lucy to give birth. Because he commits so much time to the Animal Welfare League, he grows fond of a certain dog, whom he spares every week by deciding not to put him down. Before long, though, he accepts that he’s only putting off the inevitable, and so he brings the unsuspecting animal to Bev, saying, “I am giving him up.”
