Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9247 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Synopsis
For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy with the victims and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison, branded as an enemy of the state. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegory of oppressor and oppressed. Not just a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times, the Magistrate is an analogue of all men living in complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.

About the Author
J. M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For The Barbarians; Life and Times of Michael K; Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life; Youth; and Disgrace which won the Booker Prize, making him the first author to have won it twice. In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Customer Reviews

All tyrannies thrive on a diet of rumour, propaganda and lies, and eventually lose touch with reality and fall
J M Coetzee's 1980 allegorical gem is heavily influenced by Dino Buzzati's Tartar Steppe, perhaps the most existentially melancholic novel of the twentieth century. Both are set in remote outposts in vast empty wildernesses where man and his constructions are literally just dots on the horizon. In each book there is an enemy, undefined except by rumour and by name: the northerners in Buzzati, the barbarians in Coetzee (though he does once refer to them as northerners, thus signifying his debt to Buzzati). However, the other worldliness of the Tartar Steppe is given a definite point of reference in Waiting for the Barbarians; that of a repressive imperial state resembling in theme, if not environment, Vorster's apartheid South Africa.
The narrator is a lonely magistrate in a frontier town who, though far from the centre of the oppressive state security apparatus, is complicit in its existence by administering its laws (and abusing his position by frequent sexual dalliances with vulnerable women). It doesn't take participation, just indifference, a blind eye. Although always uneasy about his role in the system, he continues as benignly as possible in order to lead a quiet life. It is only on the arrival of a group of interrogators, and having witnessed their arbitrary and brutal methods, that he instinctively rebels. At one point a girl is invited to pick up a rod and beat a prisoner in the yard. `You are depraving these people!' he shouts. He is thus branded an enemy of the state and a `barbarian lover' and committed to prison and subjected to a regime of humiliation and degradation. The breathless tension that follows is extraordinary at times.
All tyrannies survive on a diet of rumour, propaganda and lies, and eventually lose touch with reality and fall. It is true that there have been many regimes that have ruthlessly persecuted one section of the community, but what made South Africa unique was that the persecution was sanctioned by, and enshrined in, its national law. It was this that made the apartheid regime especially paranoid and nasty, and it cost them one of the world's finest writers. For Coetzee is that. There is nobody alive who can write in such taut, crystal clear, elegant English and yet exude such creative and emotional energy as this quiet, private intellectual. His books are so concise and so eloquent and so powerful that it is a mystery how he achieves the effect that he does. No wonder that the hypocritical apartheid regime was so scared of him. This and Disgrace are considered his finest works.

Dull
Like the hero of this tale, I am going to swim against the tide of opinion, and say that I was seriously unimpressed with this book. The theme is what? That men act from mixed motives? That terrible acts can be committed in the name of 'civilization'? That what unites us as human beings is more important than what divides us? That finding meaning to life is elusive? That torture is bad? These are all propositions it is hard to disagree with.

For me Coetze fails to make any of these issues fresh or compelling, and even though life in a frontier town on the 'edge of empire' is imaginatively (and in places beautifully) brought to life, the conceit of a timeless, placeless setting for the novel ultimately grates on the reader. More serious defects are the author's lengthy and repepetitive descriptions of the Magistrate's sexual meanderings and of sadistic torture meted out by the sinister Third Bureau. Does Coetze think, that by dwelling on sex and violence he will show us what a 'serious' writer he is? Such 'shocking' (ie. dull and rather embarassing) content merely seems slightly dated - a product of the 1960's or 70's when Coetze was no doubt learning his craft (he was born in 1940).

Overall, an unsatisfy and enigmatic book, which if it does have an important message has either hidden it far too well or not at all.

Is there a better man of letters in the World?
The more I read of Coetzee the more I appreciate his work. This book is a slim volume, but contains so much. The narrative reflects the dicotomy of one mans life. The main character, a Magistrate in an outpost town, is a flawed human, trying to do the right thing as often as he can. As with so much of Coetzees work this novel reaches out and asks much of the reader, it will bring things to the surface, make you consider yourself and your actions. We are all the Magistrate of the novel in one way or another.
The style of the novel is so sparse and yet incredibly dense, this is not a book you will read quickly, it needs your full attention, to absorb the cahracters and their motives. While I read it I kept comparing it to the current state of our World and the indiviuals place in it. I'm certain this was Coetzees aim and he affects it brilliantly.
You will not do better then JM Coetzee.