The title makes reference to Cavafy’s famous poem in which a population is in a state of torpor awaiting the arrival of the barbarians who never come ‘Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.’ In other words, their being barbarians made us
the civilized ones. When we posit someone/something as the ultimate ‘other’, we make them the problem. We’re right they’re wrong. It puts us in a very powerful position. It engenders fear and fear of a barbarian is a very useful way of reorganising society. Contemporary barbarians such as covid, Russia, drugs, and terror helped shape domestic and international policy.
This is a novel about imperialism, oppression, and regime politics. It’s also a man’s book about
men doing violent and violating men's things in some unknown frontier of empire. Men, dressed in their extravagant uniforms, run the outposts, go out hunting and killing people, commit savage acts of cruelty and have complete control of the settlement and its population.
The protagonist, the magistrate is an old military man and a paedophile in the midst of a
crisis of conscience. Coetzee’s women are fat with acrid armpits, whores with big slack cunts,
They are bent and toothless eating out of cast iron pots and so on. Meanwhile, the landscape
is beloved and written about with such tenderness, you could cry ‘the light green of the marshes
and the new reeds shooting over the dazzling surface of the lake’. I mean, can no man write a
woman as she really is? Are there no real women in the world? Do all male writers have to write
with such vitriol and why must they degrade and humiliate women? It’s sickening reading this
‘great’ award-winning work of ‘literature’ and this is how women are portrayed in it. What’s
Even more frustrating is that these diminishing descriptions of women in literature are not
innocently reflecting society but determining it.