[Waiting for the Barbarians] is not about South Africa: It is not about anywhere, and hence it is about everywhere.

The hero-narrator has no name, merely a title. He is a magistrate serving an anonymous empire in one of its frontier settlements—easygoing, with literary inclinations, sensual, due for retirement. He is visited by a certain Colonel Joll…. The nomenclature sounds contemporary, but Coetzee sets up a temporal dubiety…. The illusion of a composite time zone is, throughout, very skillfully maintained.

Colonel Joll is concerned, on behalf of the empire he serves, with holding back the barbarians—meaning comparatively primitive people who fish and hunt on the imperial borders. The maintenance of a Pax on such frontiers has, from the Roman to the British time, always entailed a deliberate misunderstanding of the term "peace," which comes to mean war, and an exaggeration of the danger to the center...