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.

If the place cannot be located on any map, the time, too, as in In the Heart of the Country, is impossible to pinpoint…. Yet the Third Bureau and its chief representative, Colonel Joll (very far from jolly), belong to twentieth-century totalitarianism…. What Coetzee is interested in is the abuse of power, the state's need for victims and enemies, and the predicament of the liberal conscience, not only in their South African manifestations.

The narrator is a sane liberal suddenly confronted by an authoritarian illiberalism which he cannot contend with and which calls into question the basis of his apparently secure values. His narrative describes the effect of Joll's mission on the quiet town over which he, the ageing magistrate, has presided benevolently and paternalistically for many years…. Far from feeling threatened by the barbarians, the town has achieved a modus vivendi with them, and tends to treat them with contempt, from a position of assumed superiority.

With the arrival of Joll …, all this is changed. It is like Angelo's régime after the Duke's lax rule in Measure for Measure. The magistrate recognizes this anti-barbarian virulence, resulting in Joll's atrocities, to be an outbreak of mass hysteria arising from deep-rooted anxiety about the alien and unknown rather than a response to a genuine threat. But his easy-going common-sense is no match for Joll's icy zeal, and in spite of his repugnance at Joll's methods and his sympathy for the barbarian victims he initially acquiesces by choosing non-interference rather than resistance….

[Finally] the magistrate himself is branded as an enemy and subjected to Joll's characteristic attentions. It is at this time that he finally does protest publicly at the hideous cruelty inflicted on barbarian prisoners, although the response to his appeal to common humanity is inevitably violent.

Eventually, with the town abandoned by the Third Bureau and with Joll's punitive expeditionary force reduced to a fleeing rabble by the barbarians, the magistrate is once more in charge as the remaining inhabitants await the barbarians. The atmosphere of collapse and disintegration, as though a new Dark Age is at hand, resembles that of recent prophetic fiction such as Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor.

Waiting for the Barbarians belongs to that twentieth-century sub-genre which Rex Warner helped to popularize in England during the 1930s—the political allegory or fable dealing with modern totalitarianism…. Coetzee's new novel covers well-trodden ground in a way that In the Heart of the Country did not; and despite its gripping narrative and moral insight, it does not add substantially to its tradition…. Furthermore, this kind of fiction as a whole, peopled as it is mainly by stereotypes, is often in danger of moving so far away from the familiar in its determination to establish universals that it defeats its own purpose. Graham Greene's political novels, which seize on the particular and the "ephemeral", get much closer to the heart of the matter, the human factor.