Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15411 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

About the Author
J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For The Barbarians, Life & 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

Universal allegory
The setting for this outstanding book remains without reference to a specific time and place, with only the knowledge of a distant city and the surrounding desert, and items such as sunglasses, stagecoaches and ancient muskets to steer us one way or another. The result is that the story becomes beautifully universal. I read in other reviews that people related it to (apart from the obvious South Africa) the current situation in Iraq, and it is hard to deny that the picture fits. The fact is that this story has been acted out the world over so many times during history that on reading you get a horrible feeling of familiarity. There is no doubt where the idea has its roots, but refraining from making the story specific to South Africa, Coetzee made it much easier for the reader to feel the universality. I think that is what makes this a very special book. Overall, apart from the obvious theme of oppression, the main aspect of the book that struck me was the theme of the 'other'. By the end we are left with no attack from the barbarians (which has been promised all along by the Empire), and the only other encounters have been peaceful on the barbarians behalf. In fact the only meetings with them are initiated by the Empire which, on most occasions, end in aggression from the Empire. So when the magistrate gazes into the blind eyes of the barbarian girl he befriends, he is not met with reciprocality, but only with his own reflection. I feel that is the most important point. The relationship the Empire, and especially the town, has with the barbarians has nothing to do with anyone but the Empire and the town. When the magistrate searches the girl's eyes, he is really searching his soul and the soul of the town. The barbarians are nothing but the unknown and any opinions of them stem from the towns uneducated fears. These fears are a very useful tool for the Empire. I find it very fitting that a tribute to Edward W. Said has the same title.

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.