South Africa may be the world's whipping-boy, but J. M. Coetzee is too intelligent a novelist to cater for moralistic voyeurs. This does not mean that he avoids the social and political crises edging his country towards catastrophe. But he chooses not to handle such themes in the direct, realistic way that writers of older generations, such as Alan Paton, preferred to employ. Instead, Coetzee has developed a symbolic and even allegorical mode of fiction—not to escape the living nightmare of South Africa but to define the psychopathological underlying the sociological, and in doing so to locate the archetypal in the particular. He did this in [In the Heart of the Country] …, which, with its doom-laden action of lust, violence, and revenge, resembles Greek Tragedy seen through a glass darkly. He does it rather differently in his less difficult but also less original new novel, Waiting for the Barbarians.
Whereas In the Heart of the Country had a South African setting, though one so remote that it was as close to Beckett-land, the new novel dispenses completely with a specifically South African setting. Coetzee presents an isolated town on the frontier between a nameless Empire and the wild, inhospitable land of the barbarians beyond. Like the Empire, its distant capital, and even the outpost itself, most of the characters, including the magistrate-narrator, remain unnamed, a couple of exceptions being, ironically, inhuman members of the SS-like Third Bureau of the Civil Guard, whose mission it is to suppress the barbarians.
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