Book Review: Waiting for the Barbarians is novel about the superior and the inferior, the master and slave, the demeaning and the demeaned, those over and those under. I expected this short novel to be an allegory about the sins of apartheid in the author's native South Africa, but Coetzee is working with a larger canvas, making a broader statement, applicable to any imperialist state, but even more so to any power differential between two groups. And for being written almost four decades ago, Coetzee fully illustrates the realization seen so often in recent years that in attacking those we label barbarians, we become barbarians ("the new barbarians"). We see the sensual and sybaritic Magistrate and his town living in peace with those across the border in a far flung idyll, when his eyes are opened as the Empire (for no apparent reason) flexes its muscle: "I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected there seems to be no recovering ... the knot loops in upon itself; I cannot find the end." We see his sensuality awkwardly transformed into an ineffectual attempt to make amends to a crippled barbarian woman. Eventually, his "dreams of becoming an unthinking savage" are more palatable than remaining part of his own "civilization." The Magistrate realizes that "what has become important above all is that I should neither become contaminated by the atrocity that is about to be committed nor poison myself with the impotent hatred of its perpetrators." As he states: "Empire dooms itself ... to plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end ... how to prolong its era ... by night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision." All of this, still so relevant today.
The writing is also wonderfully perceptive, Coetzee is an intelligent and talented writer, perhaps taking his lesson from some morsel of Kafka, such as "An Imperial Message." When reading, note how often the sun is described and designated, a signpost for what is embodied in the scene. As Virginia Woolf used clocks and time in Mrs. Dalloway, so Coetzee uses the sun in Waiting for the Barbarians. In the narrative the Magistrate, imperfect as he is, pays for his complicity with his own immense physical pain the whole described as an "empire of pain," and Christ-like images abound. Coetzee is writing of time and history, and like history he leaves us with a little scrap of hope at the end. For Coetzee is carefully and determinedly didactic, he knows he's writing meaningful and literary fiction, and doesn't try to keep his prestidigitation secret. The little story told here is taken from a much wider world as when using phrases like "peace in our time" and "barbarian-lover." He's writing for someone more intellectual or educated than I am. Although I get the big picture, I'm sure there's numerous points I missed. My greatest fault with Waiting for the Barbarians is a purely personal bias, and if I may, a small rant. That flaw is Coetzee's use of dreams. All readers know that literary dreams, those fabricated by an author, are nothing like the dreams of people in real life, are not believable (I'm excepting dreams that take the reader to another, otherwise inaccessible world). We are not even expected to find them credible. The reader is always aware that the author is trying to stick in some meaning, some symbolism, some foreshadowing or gloss on what is going on. Describing a character's dreams, those artificial, carefully constructed authorial tools, are the easiest, cheapest, and most obvious of an author's tricks. Perhaps this wasn't so in 1980 ... I don't know. But for me, at least, they damaged the story in their frequent use, repetition, and disturbance of the narrative. Rant done. Waiting for the Barbarians is an important and thoughtful work on a timeless subject, as significant now as when it was written. [3½★]
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