Waiting for the Barbarians

"Waiting for the Barbarians was the Coetzee book that I was always most attached to – I think it’s the Coetzee book that most South Africans are attached to. Coetzee takes the mood of the 1980s state of emergency – when people were being detained and disappearing and there was a fear of communist or black madness on the borders – and he makes it more interesting by creating this partial allegory of some unnamed empire. The whole point of the book is contained in the title. It’s a bit like The Importance of Being Earnest . It’s a book you can’t imagine with a different title. It’s about a magistrate. He works for the empire, you don’t know what the empire is and you don’t know what century it’s taking place in. The magistrate is trying to administer law and order, he’s trying to be a figure of some kind of justice. And all the time there’s fear that the barbarians are about to invade and take down the empire. All sorts of draconian measures and violations of decency are carried out in the name of emergency. Needless to say, it ends unhappily. There is always a personal subtext in writing and part of the interest in this book is that it’s hard not to see the magistrate, a failed liberal, as a version of John himself. It’s quite a beautiful book, spare and controlled and strange. The opening scene, where he’s talking about seeing his interrogator’s sunglasses for the first time, is unforgettable. Especially if you know that African security police loved wearing sunglasses. I don’t know why. It’s hard to consider that question without thinking about Disgrace , which John wrote just before upsetting everybody by emigrating. People tend to think of arts and literature as constructive – there’s a way in which John’s career is the opposite. My sense is that white South African identity is something John sees as so damaged that he wanted to destroy it. And in some ways his literary career is about destroying it. I can’t think of a single person whose emigration caused as much disturbance in South Africa as his decision to decamp for Australia in 2002. That’s a difficult question because I’ve always been unteachable and John has never been much of a teacher. He did tell me one thing that was useful. He said that he wrote four hours a day. I tried that for a couple of years and almost killed myself. Now I try to write two to three hours a day. It’s useful to think of putting in hours instead of putting down words. So even if I only make one word of headway, I can feel like I’ve done a day’s work. If he hadn’t relayed that wisdom I might have done something useful with my life, like become a lawyer. Almost everything Coetzee says is ironic, so you shouldn’t take that blurb as an endorsement. But your question was about humour in South Africa. We have a number of funny writers. Herman Charles Bosman is quite entertaining. So is Pieter-Dirk Uys. There’s a robust tradition of humour in South Africa, perhaps because we’re an inherently ridiculous society. We think about race all the time, but we can’t talk about it. Humour is a way of being racist without being responsible."