Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

J.M. Coetzee’s third novel was written while the South Africa apartheid regime was still in place and fearsomely powerful. It shows here in the ways all the recognizable evidence of colonialism is kept so generic. “Barbarians” is the term for native nomads who roam the plains beyond the village where this novel takes place and in the mountains beyond that. They are considered a problem that must be managed. The “Empire” is the distant power in control. The first-person narrator, the “Magistrate,” is a civil servant of the Empire who has spent most of his life in the village. The village is small and settled into routines that are comfortable for the village, the “barbarians,” and the narrator, who is genial and corrupt, mostly in the form of serial affairs. He was evidently always sympathetic to the natives and becomes even more so in this short novel. I stick with the scare quotes for “barbarians” because Coetzee is making the case here that these representations of the Empire show it as no less barbaric. In fact, the Empire’s use of torture is one of the main threads here. The novel has sections devoted to the village life the narrator has become accustomed to. He discusses the brutalities of the Empire, which he grows hostile to as they begin to affect him. After a long and arduous journey to return a young woman (in whom he has developed an interest) to her “barbarian” clan, he is accused of treason (or something) upon his return. He is imprisoned and tortured, and his meditations on the treatment follow. What he describes is horrible, of course, but Coetzee’s clinical dispassionate voice take some of the edge off it. Not that much. He covers the basic points, such as being denied sleep, water, food, bathing, and treatment for his wounds. He is turned into a grotesque and repulsive creature, though his narrative voice remains cool and descriptive. We see the actions of the Empire from his view. They all seem random and irrational. The Empire remains distant and almost benign in its affect. Soldiers appear, life changes in the village. Now the Empire is focused on aggression against the “barbarians”—who prove to be barbaric indeed, though not of course with the obviously vast resources of the Empire. Among other things, Coetzee is very good at showing how the Empire is basically a large and somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracy. Much here is absurd, but the realities of the terrorism of colonialism are vivid and disturbing. As Coetzee intends, this short novel admirably gets under your skin and keeps you uneasy. It has humor but more often horror. It feels authentic to what it is like to live in such regimes.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.