There is no easy dialectic in a Coetzee book; no white hats and black hats by which to tell villain and hero. Often using his native South Africa as a backdrop, Coetzee explores the implications of oppressive societies on the lives of their inhabitants. Tales such as
Waiting for the Barbarians and
Life and Times of Michael K are novels which, according to Maureen Nicholson writing in
West Coast Review, "subtly examined brutal actions in what appeared to be an allegorized South Africa."
Nicholson further commented, "[Coetzee's] writing in these novels was moving, convincing and frank. . . . Mutilation, obsession, jealousy, oppression and madness--issues at the distraught heart of Coetzee's writing--could, presented in his spare prose, make the reader sicken with recognition and realization." Writing in Southern Humanities Review, Ashton Nichols described Coetzee as "an archaeologist of the imagination, an excavator of language who testifies to the powers and weaknesses of the words he discovers." Nichols pointed to works of fiction by Coetzee such as Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life and Times of Michael K, as providing "sparse, rich allegories of the South African system and, more widely, of all forms of injustice." Comparisons to Kafka abound, and indeed, as Michael Scrogin pointed out in The Christian Century, Coetzee "has fashioned a method of storytelling that is closer to classical myth than to modern realism.
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