Review: Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

Waiting for the Barbarians is about an unnamed man, known only by his position as the “Magistrate,” and his involvement and detachment from an Empire that strives to defend itself from the surrounding Barbarians. I didn’t think I would enjoy this book. It initially frustrated me because it was so bland, even though I knew this was intentional. The unconventionality of the present tense narration, the enigmatic characters due to their unnamed identities, and the Magistrate’s incessant ambivalence towards his surroundings and his sociopathic tendencies all combined was nothing I had ever come upon in books before.

I find the style of 20^th century novels to be a little too intentional in their allegorical purpose. In 20^th century novels and especially with Coetzee, there is an almost too-cautious purposefulness in every word, which make up sentences which make blatant Coetzee’s intent. Certainly many of these passages are eloquent, but leave little for the reader to decipher on her own, which I find one of the most intellectually stimulating parts of reading fiction. Nevertheless, the messages were direct and potent, and what lacked in the effort needed to find these conclusions was made up in the further implications of such conclusions not just on the characters in the book, but in humanity overall.

An intriguing point Coetzee makes is that civilizations, especially the Empire and thus the Imperialists of the 20^th century, egregiously define ourselves through history. One of the Magistrate’s main goals throughout the story is to remove himself from the Empire’s history, and he does this in part by narrating his story in the present tense, in order to deny its preservation by the Empire. He protects the Barbarians, who in reality are calm and innocent people, from being immortalized in the history of the Empire as a brutish uncivilized people who exist to terrorize the Empire and who exist to be conquered by it. Perhaps it is better not to exist in history rather than to exist only under others’ terms.

For me, the take that I got from this story was more profound than a message about the perils of Imperialism and the farce of surrounding barbaric threats. In tandem with reading the poem that Coetzee derived the title for this novel, (A fantastic poem called “Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine P. Cavafy), I realized that it’s not just ancient and ignorant civilizations that survive by defending themselves from imaginary threats, but it’s also people too who shape their lives in the present to prepare for irrational fears of the future. Fear of failure, fear of loss, and shame are to us individuals what the barbarians were to the Empire, and we allow the uncertainties of the future to dictate our actions in the present. We need to stop envisioning and planning for the worst, and strive to do what’s best in the current. We need to stop waiting for the Barbarians because when we do finally recognize their loss of reality, our dependency on them will be so far inculcated into our daily routine that their nonexistence will leave us stranded in time.