Waiting for the Barbarians
An unnamed Empire, an unnamed Magistrate, and the torture of "barbarians" who may pose no actual threat. Coetzee's 1980 allegory applies to every empire that has ever justified atrocity through security. The Magistrate's complicity and then resistance is the most honest portrait of the liberal confronting state violence in contemporary fiction.
The allegory arrives pre-solved. Coetzee “interprets his books for you,” one reader complains, and “signposts and dissects each area of overlap” until the characters are left holding their assigned meanings. The prose gets called “all cerebral, direct and professional,” precise with no warmth in it, and the middle “hits inertia half way through the book” once Joll leaves. The Magistrate is a bystander whose conscience arrives late, and his history with the women at the fort goes largely unexamined by the novel that raises it. Readers grant the thing is well made and then call it a book “to admire rather than enjoy.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
