Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel (Penguin Ink) (The Penguin Ink Series)

Waiting for the Barbarians is not simply an indictment of imperialism, and it’s not a political book. It’s time and setting are indeterminate and the major characters are not named. In this generic setting we are given character studies, or even a morality play. The author, J. M. Coetzee, shows us how people, not unlike ourselves, cope with the good, boring, bad, and evil in an imperial outpost. And in his showing us the lives and problems of his characters in this harsh place, he avers what is delusional, what is real, and what is just unknown.The story is told by the aging civil magistrate of an unnamed imperial outpost of an unnamed empire. The magistrate copes with life by following distractions of womanizing, excavating the nearby ruins, and by deciphering the writings he finds in those ruins. When a detachment of the imperial army brings barbarian prisoners into town, the magistrate is attracted to a young woman among the captives. She is near-blind and crippled from the tortures she has suffered at the hands of an army officer, Colonel Joll.The magistrate’s obsession with the woman echoes his obsession with understanding the barbarians, the empire, his own desires, why people behave as they do, and basically everything. As he works out his relationship with the woman, it is easy to identify with his introspection and boundless curiosity. His inquisitiveness wins out even over attentiveness to his job, and he comes to pay a stiff price for it.There’s a picture here that resonates. Empires demand total allegiance and are harsh with those that give less. The magistrate lapses in his duties like many of us lapse on our jobs. Our cost is economic hardship—the threat of starvation, actually—only a degree or two away from the magistrate’s punishment.Metaphors like that make this a quote-worthy book. There’s also the magistrate’s introspections. The story is told completely from his viewpoint and we get his observations almost as if he were journaling. It’s well-done, however, and does not intefere with following the story. His insights often arise from emotional reactions to what he’s relating, such as when he feels some regret for not “lightening up” when he observes some playful good humor among his soldiers:"Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets!"Or when he realizes he is not immune from the empire’s evil:"Why should it be inconceivable that the behemoth that trampled them will trample me too? I truly believe I am not afraid of death. What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and befuddled as I am."We see his fear of ignorance here, though it’s more often expressed as his burning desire to understand everything.Another big theme is the ever-present possibility for a person’s status to change, usually for the worse. It happens to several characters and we observe how they cope. It speaks to how we deny the possibility for calamity:"No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets, that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished."Their fear of a coming attack by the “barbarians” motivates most conversations among the outpost’s population. It becomes the baseline of their existence. Even so, they go about their lives as before, though with their numbers reduced by desertion.Waiting for the Barbarians is not an action story, though it does involve soldiers in a fort, antagonisms, and struggles. Most of the story movement is character driven but it held my interest. The characters were interesting and identifiable. The themes were universal and accessible, leaving a haunting finish.The book was first published in 1980. Threads in it, however, strike me as being very relevant to this present time, especially in the US where the machinations of empire have become prominent. There is an anticipation of disaster in the air that mirrors waiting for barbarians (indeed, we are bombarded with “news” and commentary about the barbarian horde said to be murderously envious of our “freedoms”). The magistrate’s warning about the fragility of our tranquil certainties rings true, and the sound is a funeral bell’s hollow peal.

Here Coetzee has written a fable that is not just timeless but also exists outside of time. Maybe this is a specious distinction, but I think the first descriptor is one assigned to books by their readers while the second is applied by the book's author. Purposely Coetzee withholds dates or details that might allow us to assign the events in the story to a particular time period. The characters remain, for the most part, nameless. The book's antagonists are known by their titles--Colonel Joll, Officer Mandel--representatives of an allegorical empire which itself remains nameless and could just as easily be Roman, British, Ottoman, even American. "Waiting for the Barbarians" is told from the viewpoint of an aging magistrate in a backwater territory of the empire at the edge of an inhospitable area of mountains and desert. The magistrate and his townspeople are aware that "barbarians" exist outside the walls of their town, but the barbarians are simply nomads who cause them no threat. Then the empire arrives, personified by Colonel Joll. The barbarians are made into devils who must be pushed back or subjugated. Joll's soldiers occupy the town and take what they desire, whether food or women, while Joll mounts a campaign against the barbarians. He rounds up a few prisoners and tortures them before setting out to find more. The magistrate is accused of treason after committing an act of kindness to one of the female barbarians and he too is tortured. Torture and occupation become the prime methods of the empire. Meanwhile the barbarians Joll pursues lead him deeper into the mountains. They never engage, and Joll's true enemy becomes the elements. Coetzee's book was written over thirty years ago, but the parallels to more recent events in Iraq or Afghanistan are impossible to ignore. Of course one could also draw parallels to the British in colonial America, the Russians in Afghanistan, or Americans in Vietnam. The tactics of the native "barbarians" are, by necessity, largely the same: guerrilla warfare, ambushes, using the landscape to one's advantage. It is interesting that by the end of "Waiting for the Barbarians," Colonel Joll flees in defeat and the town returns to its previous state. Nothing aside from destruction and misery has been achieved. Like other Coetzee novels, this is a spare, poetic book, each word carefully chosen, which brings up the interesting question of the sex that occurs in it. The magistrate finds himself achieving a strange intimacy with the barbarian woman he helps. He also employs the services of a young prostitute and, at a later point, makes love to a middle-aged widow. There ensue some descriptions of the old man's waning sex drive, along with his speculations that he's pursuing these younger women as a way of reclaiming his youth. This motif of the old man-young woman dalliance has shown up in other Coetzee books, so maybe it's just a preoccupation of his, but maybe he's also making the comparison of male conquest on a personal scale with male conquest on an epic scale, i.e. the empire claiming new lands for itself. All in all, "Waiting for the Barbarians" is a beautiful if harrowing book. Like a fable, it is dreamlike, lacking the vivid and gritty details of Coetzee books like "Disgrace," but thematically it shares many of the same concerns of "Disgrace" while removing them from a particular historical context.

A very dreary story, but does not measure up the nihilistic pessimism of earlier existential literature. This story was too abstract. Maybe the author had his reasons for the abstractness, but that is never made clear. The main characters not identified by name and we get no hint at all as why three others characters are named. We don't get any idea as to time and place, but there are interesting ideas, even insights, expressed throughout. The magistrate is a complex and interesting character, the closest to a hero; but there are no heroes nor any victors in this strange story by Coetzee. It has probably been over-rated as a great novel.

J.M. Costner at his most brilliant. He peels away the "layers of the onion" and inevitably the result is tears. This book lays bare the hubris of empire, the self-destructive paranoia that can so easily infect the guardians and the helpless impotence of liberal resistance from within. The corrosive impact of militarisation on civil functions of government, the destruction of social fabric by military occupation (even by garrisons in their own territory) and the dangers of creating an impetus for self justification of oppression are all explored in this dystopian novel. Coetzee also confronts the painful realities of aging and the onset of maturity that can bring with it uncertainty about the myths of superiority,, growing sentimentality about humanity and a desperate fear of one's personal decline and inevitable mortality. This is reflected in the main characters growing awareness of the futility of the empires punitive actions against the "barbarians", his personal voyage of discovery that leads him to enter into a liaison with a young barbarian woman and his p punishment and ostracism by his community that leads to his humiliation and suffering as he chooses to confront his own civilisation and challenge it's excess and senseless violence. A powerful story with painful lessons for us all.

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel about a faithful servant "The Magistrate" of the Empire who rules the roost over an outpost that shouldn't exist in the South African wilderness. He lives a steady life, pottering about and enjoying whatever comforts are possible in his remote community, until everything changes on the arrival of a man who believes that the indigenous population are the enemy rather than the occupying force. The Magistrate takes offence at such notions and his stance brings about his spectacular downfall. Coetzee is clearly a skilled writer and there are many elements of a good story here, but unfortunately the novel suffers from over indulgent introspection that stifles any forward momentum. Fascinating and rewarding in parts, but too often a trial of patience.

I heard about this book on BBC A Good Read and was looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately i found it truly distasteful unpleasant and boring.The main premise of the book is that a bullying, abusive ageing paedophile who has been working in an outpost goes native. Through a series of odd events he is allowed to describe in detail his abuse of power and in graphic detail his abuse of women. He then appears to regret some of this and try and get some redemption by returning a maimed child whom he has abused to her family. Its supposed to give the message that torturers of any sort will find it hard to live with themselves, good point but not from this abuser.

A disturbing tale and one that at times is difficult to read. A man with authority is reduced to a tortured and defiled prisoner as a result of a desire to make up for wrongs done to a woman by himself and the powers that overwhelm him.It makes one question the supposed superiority of so called western or eastern civilisations in relation to more simple societies. Empires do not exist forever and yet their very raison d'être is that they will survive for eternity!The story to my mind is closest to the story of the founding of America and its push westwards with the consequent destruction or the rendering to impotence of native tribes.

I will not claim to understand all that the Coetzee is trying to say in this novel, but I think he is examining the nature of civilisation, the complexities of the human condition which lead to violence and how little we understand one another - or even try to. Did the Barbarians really exist or were they just simple people living outside the compound who became the focus for all that is ugly in man?There are few better writers than Coetzee. His ability to write a great literary novel which also examines such huge themes is remarkable.