Waiting for the Barbarians

This is my third Coetzee book, the first two being Disgrace (read it in early high-school, too young to appreciate it) and Diary of a Bad Year (read it last year, too young to appreciate it). Considering I’ve known about and read the guy’s work for 5 years now, I was a little embarrassed to learn I’ve been mispronouncing his name. So, for your edification:

Coat-SAY-uh

That said, the novel.

Coetzee uses first person present tense, which is perhaps language at its most elemental. It allows him to write sentences as simple as, “I pass.” This simplicity, immediacy, and the cleanness of Coetzee’s prose gives the book the feeling of a fable, though its moral isn’t so clean as Tortoise and the Hare’s. You can fall into the book, though it’s only 156 pages, since Coetzee’s done such an admirable job of creating psychological depth for his protagonist, the Magistrate.

We’re never given a first name — just the Magistrate. Coetzee strips the book of all specificity to increase its universality. So we never learn much about the Empire, or the barbarians who perhaps threaten it. We don’t even know which country it’s set in. All of this serves the book’s purpose; its liquid enough that it’ll fit into whatever container it’s reader would like. For instance, as an American in 2009, the book’s themes of torture and imperialism of course carry a special relevance, and resonate more strongly because Coetzee never anchors the plot to his native South Africa. This way, you aren’t given the easy excuse of saying, “Ah, but that’s somewhere else. That doesn’t happen here.” Well… yeah. It does.

In the book, the Magistrate presides over a sleepy backwater. Mostly thinking about his retirement, his comfortable existence is upset by the appearance of Colonel Joll, dispatched by the shadowy Third Bureau, the Empire’s secret service. Joll’s an interrogator, a “doctor of pain,” and during the course of the Colonel’s business, the Magistrate has to confront his long neglected moral compass.

Joll, in describing his methods to the Magistrate, focuses on pressure.

First I get lies, you see – this is what happens – first lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth.

Coetzee develops his narrative pressure with a skillful touch, propelling the Magistrate through his character arc, pushing him, testing him, and then finallly, the break. The sense of structure and assurance laces the text, and what text it is. Waiting for the Barbarians is an earlier work, but Coetzee has some great prose on display. Samples:

With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning’s hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.

I didn’t even have to consult the book for the back half of that quote, it’s stuck with me so well. There’s an M John Harrison vibe about that passage that thrilled me, plus the reliable pleasure of hundred word sentences, doubled when you consider Coetzee’s typical restraint.

He exercises the same discipline over his novels as he does over each sentence, and at a quick 156 pages, Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel seemingly without excess, an idea thoroughly conceived and executed. Well worth the little time it takes to read.