Slow Man - Characters

Characters

• Paul Rayment, a French expatriate in his sixties now living in Adelaide, who at the beginning of the novel has his right leg above the knee amputated after a bicycle accident. He is a photographer by profession who has no children of his own and no ties to his homeland or his adopted country, except a collection of 19th-century Australian photographs.
• Elizabeth Costello, an aging Australian writer famous for her early novel The House on Eccles Street, which re-tells James Joyce's Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist's wife, Molly Bloom. She appears on Paul's doorstop about one-third into the novel and begins interfering with his life by setting him up on a 'blind' date with a woman he glimpsed at the hospital and pushing him to declare his feelings for his carer. It is also heavily implied throughout the novel that he is a character in a book she is writing. Costello is the eponymous protagonist of Coetzee's previous novel.
• Marijana Jokic, a paid nurse who cares for Paul at his home and becomes the object of his affections and desires. Her family are refugees from Croatia.
• Drago Jokic, Marijana's sixteen-year-old son, whom Paul looks upon as the son he never had.