Set in a northern border oasis in some unstated time and place,
South African novelist Coetzee's novella is pared down to
metaphorical essentials. A magistrate (who also serves as narrator)
finds his jurisdiction usurped by the arrival of a
sunglasses-wearing newcomer: Colonel Jell of the Third Bureau, a
torturer sent by the nervous central government to try to wipe out
encroachment by the "barbarians" lying in wait beyond the border.
And among Joll's victims is a captured barbarian girl: she's
tortured, made temporarily blind, her feet broken. But then the
girl is taken in by the magistrate-narrator - at first as his ward,
then his bedmate, and finally his sexual partner; and thus the girl
grows into a symbol, for the magistrate, of all the ambiguities in
the sex/power equation, ambiguities which are being played out on a
larger and far more brutal scale by Jell and his men. After leaving
the outpost and letting the girl go back to her people, the
magistrate returns to find himself branded an enemy, subject to
prison and torture. And finally, as the defenders under Jell become
more and more hysterical at the continual barbarian guerrilla
successes, cruelty is followed by flight - with the old, now
physically broken magistrate left to await the barbarians' victory.
His ultimate advice to the departing torturers: "The crime that is
latent in us we must inflict on ourselves, not on others." Coetzee
(From the Heart of the Country, 1977) has set up a stringent South
Africa allegory here - with enormous potential for menace and
dread. Unfortunately, however, his presentation is so bloodless, so
dutiful in its intellectualization, that only toward the end do we
get a palpable sense of the stark geography in which all this
nerve-wracking waiting is being played out. Lucid but uninvolving:
a psycho-political thesis worked out too abstractly and predictably
to hold most readers. (Kirkus Reviews)
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state.
J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency.
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