Something Terrible

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a terrible novel - terrible in the most uncomfortable sense of that word: it invokes a sense of something approaching moral dread in its unrelenting focus on human weakness and stupidity. As usual with his work, I finished it almost too quickly as I found myself needing to read it almost against my will.

I assume the reader is intended in some sense to identify with the unnamed Magistrate who narrates the story, and I suppose Coetzee leaves a sliver of light in the odd decency and strange courage of the man. But I found myself only in his weaknesses.

There's a point where you feel you can have too much moral intensity - and that, I suspect, is the point to which Coetzee intends to push us to show us how shabby we are.