For the past decades the frontier post has come to a peaceful existence: natives from this unknown land and administrators from the Empire coexist within the limits of a wall that separates them from the back of the beyond where only the nomads – the barbarians –wander, using ancient routes to come and go with products to trade. The Magistrate of this post has served for thirty years, and justice is administered without the need for imprisonment or corporal punishment.

But news of an upcoming rebellion reaches this faraway land and the Empire sends its forces. Colonel Joll arrives at the frontier and cells are about to be filled with blood from old men, sick boys and women in transit close to the post; all suspicious, all barbarians, to the men of the Empire. For the first time, the Magistrate is forced to face the machinery he belongs to. In a land he calls home, this man now recognizes who the real barbarians are and takes sides with the oppressed.

In this novel, Coetzee explores the resistance within the colonizers, facing the horror of the brutality of their countrymen towards the colonized peoples of the invaded lands. Paradoxically, however, the Magistrate is part of this system, and his own position is founded on the brutality that others exercised before his time. The image of the last of the tortured barbarians, a young girl who is now blind and crippled, prompts a transformation in him: he is now committed to the impossible task of restoring the previous status quo.

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization; and upon this resolution I based the conduct of my administration. (I say this who now keep a barbarian girl for my bed!).

Through the Magistrate and the barbarian girl, the story explores all the ways in which the forces of the colonizers try to keep resistance at bay. First, the girl has been physically tortured in a metaphor of the exploitation of foreign lands. This prompts the Magistrate to start an inner journey through the nursing of girl, which ultimately leads him on a real journey, crossing the unknown lands in order to take the girl back to her people. In the end, the need for justice and restoration makes him alien amongst his own people, who cannot understand this new fixation with the barbarian girl in a clear misunderstanding of his real motifs.

On his return to the post, he is considered a traitor. The Magistrate never thought there could be any retaliation; he is a server of the Empire after all, but the machinery of the colonizers does not allow deviation, and he is soon imprisoned, deprived of food and water, and humiliated in front of who used to be his subjects. But the lower he falls at the hands of the officials, the clearer it is that the barbarians live within the walls of the post.

And is there any principle behind my opposition? Have I not simply been provoked into a reaction by the sight of one of the new barbarians usurping my desk and pawing my papers?

This is a very uncomfortable story, the reader witnessing the unjustifiable tortures that are happening within the Magistrate’s domain, him not taking part in them, but without the possibility of preventing them either. The inner journey of the Magistrate through the barbarian girl is maybe a bit more difficult to understand: he seeks forgiveness, but it is not to come until he sets her free amongst her people in a journey that costs him his position: she is someone of no value – a barbarian, and a woman, and he has thought and acted against the desires of the Empire.

The novel ends with an almost deserted post, its inhabitants torn apart by the brutality of the officers, waiting for the barbarians to finally come. Maybe the barbarians will end these people’s lives, or maybe they will set them free.

Although disturbing and tense, this is a highly recommended book, as it is the recent film based on the novel, starring Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson and Gana Bayarsaikhan.