[As] soon as you start probing [Waiting for the Barbarians] for clues as to a possible historical model the book's meaning sways towards the allegorical. Conversely, if you look for specific allegorical components the vivid, concrete qualities reassert themselves. The frontier town is real and its inhabitants are as plausible and as inconsistent as living people. The barbarians beyond the horizon are real men on horseback, pointing ancient weapons that can kill. And yet this is no conventional adventure story of life in a frontier outpost….

Mr Coetzee has produced a remarkable book which works at varying levels of abstraction. It is, in the first place, a gripping account of frontier strife on the periphery of a great empire, replete with political and military dimensions. At this level, it would communicate to the Russian field commanders in Afghanistan just as it would have carried a message for British...