Books That Stay with Me: “Waiting for the Barbarians” by J. M. Coetzee

In 2004, an uncle I deeply admired handed me a thin novel without much explanation, just a small smile, and said, “Try this.” Until then, most of my reading was dutiful: education, leadership, learning design, the things I believed would make me better at my work. He seemed to sense that my curiosity was tugging at the edges of that narrow path. So he gave me Waiting for the Barbarians, as if placing a compass in my hand before I even knew I was lost.

What struck me wasn’t the “story,” but the feeling of being watched by it. A border-town Magistrate serves an aging Empire that no longer remembers what it stands for. He’s a civil servant of the old school: mild, orderly, convinced that reason and routine can soften the edges of power. Then Colonel Joll arrives, carrying with him the Empire’s latest obsession: rumours that the so-called barbarians beyond the border are preparing for war.

The Magistrate knows this isn’t true. The nomadic tribes have lived alongside the Empire for generations. But Joll isn’t interested in truth; he’s interested in confession. The Empire demands a story of danger, so danger must be produced. Prisoners are taken. “Interrogations” follow. Bodies come back broken, and the town adjusts its gaze to avoid seeing them.

The real plot unfolds inside the Magistrate as he begins to sense that decency, untested, is only a costume. He takes in a young barbarian woman who has been blinded and maimed by the Empire’s soldiers. His care for her is clumsy, tender, and morally fraught. He wants to help her, yet he also wants to read his own innocence in her silence. Coetzee lets that discomfort hang in the air like dust.

Eventually he decides to escort her back to her people, a journey that feels less like a mission and more like a confession he doesn’t know how to voice. When he returns, the Empire turns on him. He is arrested for “collaborating with the enemy,” mocked by the very system he once served. His fall from authority is both humiliating and oddly liberating. Without the weight of office, he is forced to see power without its polite mask.

The story doesn’t build toward a battle or a grand moral reckoning. Instead, the Empire’s forces eventually pack up and leave, frustrated and confused, still waiting for an enemy that never appears. Winter settles over the town. Snow collects in corners. Life resumes, shakily, as if everyone is learning to walk again after believing for months that disaster was just beyond the horizon.

There are no barbarians at the gates, no invading armies, no triumphant return to order. Just the slow, almost embarrassing realization that the fear was self-made. The Magistrate, now reduced to an ordinary resident in the place he once governed, moves through these days with a kind of tired honesty. He has seen what power looks like when it convinces itself it is moral. At one point he remarks, “Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.” He watches the town repair itself, not with hope exactly, but with an understanding that illusions can survive long after the storytellers have gone.

That was the spell the book cast on me. Coetzee’s prose is stripped down, almost austere, yet every page feels like a room full of shadows that insist on being examined. He builds tension not through action but through moral pressure. A single clean sentence tilting the world by a few degrees. You start reading about an Empire on a distant frontier and realize slowly, steadily, that you’re reading about how any society teaches people to fear, obey, and forget.

This novel marked a shift in me. It was the first time I understood that fiction could carry truths with more force than any research report. It made me read the world the way the Magistrate reads the girl with the damaged eyes: slowly, with discomfort, and with the uneasy sense that something essential has been hidden under the surface for too long. It nudged me toward a broader, deeper engagement with history, politics, and the unsettling ways institutions script our thinking.

And every time I return to it, I think of my polymath uncle. Sometimes a person doesn’t just hand you a book – they hand you a different way of seeing. This was the first novel that widened the doorway of my curiosity, and the one that taught me that literature can be both mirror and lantern.

If I had to choose a book that has stayed with me in the deepest sense, this would be one of them.