[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 proconsuls, Roman provincial governors or American cavalrymen subjugating the Indians. But the Empire … is not just spatial but also temporal. It is a metaphor for the quotidian round, familiar and secure, but menaced always by the hidden perils of an impenetrable future. At this level, the story is a psychologically resonant parable about contemporary Western man, basking in plenty and technological ease in a world that he has himself seeded with doomsday machines. In broader temporal perspective, the Empire is history itself. In perhaps its most pregnant manifestation, the Empire is the human mind, ordered, prosperous and fecund but surrounded permanently by the 'barbarous' forces of madness and hallucination. The Empire finally represents … an ambiguity which governs all relationships and dissolves all clear-cut moral judgments. In the end there is no distinction between the torturer and the good administrator.

The text is haunted by literary echoes….

Mr Coetzee lectures in English … and there is little doubt that the literary references are deliberate. They add a further structural dimension to a work which derives part of its impact from a subtle interweaving of planes of meaning. But the book is also the story of a self-indulgent old administrator who is surprised, and rather dismayed, to discover within himself the incapacity to tolerate outrage even when Government demands it. The barbarians may be at the gate. But with defenders like this novelist at his post their final assault will continue to be postponed.