Astoundingly original, ambitious in its themes, and deeply human in its feelings. A moral parable of the 20th century, wrapped in the successively revealed layers of a fantasy world that is as lovingly crafted as any “world-building” exercise out of Tolkien or Ursula K. Le Guin.
The “magistrate” (I use quotes here because this is the only way the nameless protagonist is identified) of an outpost town of an unnamed empire (the closest analogue would be the British empire in Afghanistan, or the Russians on the Eurasian steppes) hosts a visit from a colonel of the state police intent on making war on the “barbarians” who (supposedly) threaten the empire from just beyond its borders.
There are notes of Orwell and Kafka in the conflict between the magistrate and this representative of the state police (and by extension, of the state itself), but the transportation of the 20th century themes that interested these two writers to a world with the technology of the 19th century and the stark, geopolitical simplicity (and language) of the classical age gives the novel its lovely uncanny feeling, as if the magistrate is meant to echo not only Winston Smith, but also Seneca, Socrates, and, perhaps, Pontius Pilate.
Coetzee’s thesis, the moral of his story, is a statement about moral cowardice and its opposite that feels so universal that it seems strange that it took the latter half of the 20th century for it to be made.