BOOK: William Beckford, "Vathek"

William Beckford: Vathek. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Lonsdale. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford University Press, 1998. 0192836560. xliii + 170 pp.

The eighteenth century was the time when Westerners began taking a really keen interest in Middle Eastern stories. Galland's translation of the Arabian Nights at the beginning of that century was probably the catalyst for this; many other translations followed, both of the Arabian Nights and other similar works; soon, European writers were inspired to try writing ‘Oriental tales’ of their own, and so a new genre was born.

For some, the Middle Eastern setting presented an opportunity to discuss philosophical, political or social questions and sometimes to say things which it might be politically incorrect for them to say openly about their own society; but for some, it was first and foremost a licence to indulge in wild, unabashed exoticism. The only other 18th-century Oriental tale I've read before was Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, was more of the former type; but it's been such a long time since I've read it that I remember pretty much nothing about it.

Well, the subject of the present post, William Beckford's Vathek, falls squarely into the second camp. It is a delightful, decadent little hothouse plant of a novel, set in a lurid, fantastical Middle East where despotism and slavery are the only forms of social organization, where magic and blasphemy rub shoulders with religious zealotry, where mortals traffic easily with demons, and where the plot is little more than an excuse for the writer to throw a steady stream or surprising and turbulent scenes into the reader's face. I loved every minute of it.

The book begins with an informative introduction by the editor, Roger Lonsdale, which I found very interesting because I had known nothing about Beckford until then. He inherited great wealth from his father (p. vii), and was marked by “escapist longings for the exotic and beautiful” (p. viii) from an early age. He was inspired to write Vathek — at the age of just twenty-one — by a particularly memorable three-day-long house-party (“these days and nights of exquisite refinements”, p. xi). Much of his later work was published only long after his death, if at all.

He spent much time on the Continent, and actually wrote Vathek in French (p. xiii). It was translated into English by Samuel Henley, a clergyman with a “scholarly interest in oriental literature” (p. xiv), who also equipped the translation with a ponderous mass of learned notes. Henley was supposed to wait for Beckford to publish the French original first, but then he published his translation anyway, with a preface that suggested he had translated it from Arabic and gave no credit to Beckford as the author at all! (Pp. xv–xvii.) In any case, Beckford did publish the French text subsequently, and revised it several times in later editions; he also pruned away at least half of Henley's notes when he reprinted his translation some thirty years later. This version is what we get in the present book as well, but I couldn't help feeling some regret that we do not get to see Henley's original notes in all their bloated, overgrown glory.

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I was surprised to learn that a caliph named Vathek really existed, was the grandson of the famous Haroun al-Rashid, and had a Greek mother named Carathis. But that, I guess, is where the similarities with Beckford's protagonist end. His Vathek lives in great splendour, has five palaces — one for each of the five senses — and a burning thirst for knowledge, even of the occult sciences. One day a mysterious Giaour shows up in Samarah, Vathek's capital, exhibiting strange mechanical items: sabres that strike by themselves and the like (p. 5), decorated with inscriptions that change every day (p. 11). When Vathek falls ill, the Giaour cures him with a potion, but refuses to explain what was in it; a bizarre episode follows: Vathek falls into a rage, starts kicking the Giaour, the whole population of the city feels an irresistible urge to join in and the Giaour rolls around like a giant football, eventually disappearing into a precipice outside the city (pp. 18–20).

The Giaour's voice is eventually heard from the chasm; he is evidently a demon of some sort, and offers Vathek great rewards if he abandons islam. Vathek, motivated as much by a thirst for knowledge than as for material rewards, is quick to agree, and seals the deal by sacrificing fifty children of his advisors to the Giaour (pp. 24–7). But then the chasm just closes and Vathek gets nothing. His mother, Carathis, is even more evil than Vathek, she approves of his deal with the Giaour and realizes that certain additional rituals will be necessary (p. 30), which involves burning a number of citizens on a sacrificial pyre (p. 34). A message from the Giaour then arrives, expressing his approval and bidding Vathek travel to the city of Istakhar or Persepolis to receive his rewards (p. 36).

Vathek departs, though not before indulging in some further blasphemies (such as profaning a sacred broom brought by a recent embassy from Mecca, causing the pious ambassadors to die of shock; pp. 40–1). He travels in great state, with his harem and slaves and everything, but they make slow and difficult progress. Eventually they meet two dwarfs, who say they have been sent by the Emir Fakreddin to help Vathek (p. 51). The pious Fakreddin, who does not yet realize what a monster Vathek has become, invites him to rest for a while at his palace. Vathek takes an interest in Fakreddin's beautiful daughter, Nouronihar; she is already in love with her cousin Gulchenrouz (pp. 64–5), but then one night she has a vision of the subterranean riches that are to be hers when she marries Vathek (p. 70–1), and she seems to be intrigued by the prospect.

Fakreddin tries to protect her and Gulchenrouz by having them drugged into a deep coma and pretending that they have died (pp. 74–6), hoping that Vathek would then soon continue on his journey. Meanwhile the young couple are kept in a remote location which they are led to believe is actually some kind of purgatory! (Pp. 78–80.) Vathek feels guilty and keeps visiting her grave; eventually he finds Nouronihar walking around and they realize that Fakreddin tricked them (p. 84). Nouronihar decides to elope with Vathek, preferring him to Gulchenrouz who is just a boy and frankly more girlish than herself (p. 85).

Carathis, learning of Vathek's intentions to renounce his quest, hurries to find him and stiffen his resolve; he refuses to abandon Nouronihar, but agrees to continue on the journey to the Giaour's city (pp. 90–4). Carathis even tries to murder Gulchenrouz and sacrifice his heart to the Giaour, but he is rescued in time by a good spirit (p. 97). She returns to the capital while Vathek continues his journey, committing further blasphemies along the way (pp. 101–2). At one point, he is almost induced by a well-meaning spirit to feel remorse for his actions, but then his pride prevails again (pp. 104–5).

The Giaour receives them in a vast subterranean palace and takes them to his master, Eblis (who is basically the islamic equivalent of Satan). The latter welcomes them into the ranks of his worshippers and gives them full access to the palace with its riches and occult items (p. 111). The only odd thing is that the other such worshippers seem to be wandering about the place in a curiously distraught state, clutching their hearts constantly; and sure enough, as the Giaour explains before disappearing, the hearts of Eblis's votaries are constantly on fire, a fate which is to befall Vathek and Nouronihar as well in a few days (p. 114). They spend this time talking to a handful of other princes who happen to be there, awaiting the same fate; and Vathek maliciously sends for Carathis to join them, without of course telling her about the heart-burning thing (p. 115). The novel ends with a very conventional-seeming moral lesson as their hearts burst into flame and they gaze at each other in agony and despair (pp. 119–20).

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Vathek's countless crimes and blasphemies are presented in such a breezy, light-hearted fashion that it's hard to take them quite as seriously as they in principle deserve, and as a result it's also hard to take the moral lesson in which the novel ends very seriously. It's hard to think of it as anything more than a mere fig leaf which was not meant to be any more serious than anything else in the novel.

It is likewise hard to feel much in the way of sympathy for Vathek's countless victims, as we rarely get to know them well enough for that. If the novel introduced you to one child and then had Vathek kick him into the chasm, you could feel sorry for it; but when Vathek kicks 50 anonymous children into the chasm without us getting to know them first (p. 27), they are a mere abstract statistic whose death passes unremarked and unlamented by the reader.

The closest we get to a sympathetic victim of Vathek is probably with Gulchenrouz, but he is so bland, weak and bloodless that it's hard to resist feeling more contempt than pity for him. As for Norounihar, she can't quite count as a victim since she becomes a willing and enthusiastic participant in Vathek's project. I think it's pretty clear that the author doesn't particularly want us to sympathize with Vathek's victims. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that he wants us to think of Vathek as a sympathetic figure either; more likely, the novel is simply a-moral, its purpose being simply to exercise the author's imagination and paint lurid scenes from the exotic East. In this purpose it succeeds admirably well, and makes for a tasty if not very filling read.

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A funny passage from one of Henley's notes: referring to two Hindu deities, he says that “The traditions of their votaries are, probably, allegorical; but without a key to disclose their mystic import, they are little better than senseless jargon; and, with the key, downright nonsense.” (P. 145.) :))

ToRead:

A number of other potentially interesting works in the ‘Oriental tale’ genre, as well as early travel books, are mentioned in the introduction and notes. Perhaps I'll get around to reading some of them some day:

• Tales, Translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi (by Alexander Dow). 2 vols., 1768. Mentioned here on pp. 123, 143.
• Henry Weber: Tales of the East: Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin, and the Best Imitations by European Authors. 3 vols., Edinburgh, 1812. Mentioned here on pp. 123, 126, 147.
• Anthony Hamilton: Fairy Tales and Romances. Trans. by M. Lewis, H. T. Ryde, and C. Kenney (1849). Mentioned here on pp. 123, 127. Hamilton was an ancestor of Beckford (p. xxvi) and, it seems, likewise wrote in French.
• M. P. Conant: The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1908). Mentioned here on p. 126.
• John Hawkesworth: Almoran and Hamet (1761). Mentioned here on p. 130.
• James Ridley: Tales of the Genii (1764). Mentioned here on p. 130.
• William Jones: Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatic Languages (Oxford, 1772). Mentioned here on p. 132.
• Voltaire: Zadig and Other Tales, trans. by R. B. Boswell (1891). Mentioned here on pp. 133, 155, especially the tale “Travels of Scarmentado”.
• Richard Pococke: A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (2 vols., 1743–5). Mentioned here on p. 131.
• John Cook: Voyages and Travels through the Russian Empire, Tartary, and Part of the Kingdom of Persia (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1770). Mentioned here on p. 136.
• Frederick Hasselquist: Voyages and Travels in the Levant (1776; trans. from the Swedish, Stockholm, 1757). Mentioned here on p. 142.
• Richard Owen Cambridge: The Fakeer: A Tale (1756). Mentioned here on p. 145.
• J. P. Bignon: Avantures d'Abdalla (1712; English trans. by W. Hatchett, 1729). Mentioned here on p. 155.
• Thomas Gueullette: Mogul Tales, or, The Dreams of Men Awake (2 vols., 1736). Translated from the French (1732). Mentioned here on p. 157.
• Near the end of the novel, Vathek meets other princes who are trapped in the palace of Eblis like himself, and listens to their tales. This could be the setting of stories nested within the main story, similar to how you find them in the Arabian Nights; but Beckford never quite got around to finishing these nested stories, or “Episodes” as he called them. Nevertheless they were eventually translated into English by Frank T. Marzials and published in 1912 (pp. xxii, 158).

BOOK: Yann Martel, "Life of Pi"

Yann Martel: Life of Pi. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003. 184195392X. xvi + 319 pp.

This novel made quite a splash when it was first published, in 2001 or so. I'm not sure where I first heard of it myself; probably it was on the website of its British publisher, Canongate. At the time this was a small Scottish publishing company and I was mostly interested in their Canongate Classics series, which included a number of works of older Scottish literature. I bought several of them and visited the publisher's website regularly. Later they began to focus more on publishing modern fiction and I gradually lost interest in them. The Life of Pi, which seems to have been a great success for them, was perhaps an early step in this transition. I bought it soon after it came out in paperback, but only got around to reading it now.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and was overall pleasantly surprised. The author clearly has a rich and vivid imagination, and there's something new and unexpected on almost every page. I suspect that people who like literary fiction would not turn up their noses at this novel, but it was also able to entertain someone like me, who am more interested in excitement and storytelling.

In the first part of the novel, we learn about the protagonist's childhood in 1970s India. Pi's father, Mr. Patel, runs a zoo in Pondicherry. Pi's full name is in fact Piscine Molitor Patel, after a swimming pool in Paris which an older friend of the family had frequented while a student there in the 1930s (p. 11; that's what I meant by rich imagination — how do people come up with something as bizarre as this? :)); but our protagonist reinvented himself as Pi after being tired of people mispronouncing Piscine as Pissing (pp. 22–3).

There are many interesting remarks about zookeeping, which is often portrayed in a vaguely negative light nowadays, so it was nice to see Pi describing it in a more positive way. He points out that a wild animal normally maintains a territory large enough to contain the resources it needs — food, water, shelter etc. — and that in a zoo it is provided with all these things in a much smaller area, so it is content to think of that as its territory and does not feel unhappy there. Pi compares this to the way that a modern person is content, indeed happy, to live in a house and does not miss having to roam for miles to reach food or water the way our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors might have done (pp. 16–19).

An odd feature of Pi, which I didn't quite know what to do with, is his religious bent. His parents are vaguely Hindu but in practice almost completely secular; but he becomes an ardent believer in, and practitioner of, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, all three at the same time (pp. 47–62)! There is a very funny scene where the priests of all three religions finally realize that he has been visiting all three of them at once (pp. 65–9).

Due to political and economic uncertainties, Pi's parents decide to close the zoo, sell off the animals and move the whole family to Canada. They embark on a Japanese cargo ship with a sullen Taiwanese crew, and with the Patels (and their animals) as the only passengers. Not too far into the Pacific, the ship has an unexplained accident and sinks quickly, with Pi as the only survivor. And this is where the main part of the story begins.

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Technically, Pi is not the only survivor: besides him, his lifeboat hosts a hyena, a badly injured zebra, an orangutan and, worst of all, a tiger with the implausibly human name of Richard Parker (due to an old bureaucratic mixup; pp. 132–3). Over the next few days, the hyena kills the zebra and the orangutan, and is then itself killed by the tiger.

The middle part of the novel is a great story of survival at sea, as Pi has to exert all his mental and physical energies to stay alive and prevent the tiger from attacking him. He puts his zookeeping skills to good use and sort of tames the tiger much the way a circus trainer might do (pp. 43–4, 164–5, 203–7). Using the various supplies stored on the lifeboat, he makes an improvised raft so he can keep some distance from the tiger if necessary; he deploys solar stills and raincatchers to obtain fresh water; he catches fish, turtles and even the occasional shark, knowing that he must keep providing the tiger with food if he wants to have any chance of staying alive.

The story takes on a somewhat picaresque character as various incidents happen in a seemingly random order; storms, sharks, whales, a close encounter with a large tanker (which unfortunately doesn't notice Pi's lifeboat; pp. 233–4), sailing through what seems to be the great Pacific garbage patch (pp. 237–8), etc. But things grow more and more fantastic and bizarre as the story progresses, in a way which perhaps reflects the gradual breakdown of Pi's own mind. (This reminded me a little of Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym.)

Over the course of several months, it becomes clear that despite all his efforts, the overall lack of food and the exposure to the elements are slowly weakening both Pi and the tiger. At some point they both go blind due to weakness (p. 241), and in that condition they even meet another equally blind survivor, who tries to board Pi's boat, apparently with a view to cannibalizing him, but is then killed and eaten by the tiger (pp. 254–5). But did this really happen or was Pi just hallucinating at that point? (A few pages ago he reported a conversation with the tiger, so he was definitely halucinating then; 243–5.)

Eventually they reach a large floating island composed of algae, and the story takes leave of all sanity. The algae apparently filter salt out of the freshwater, so eating them provides Pi (and the tiger) with both food and drink, and they gradually recover their strength. Venturing deeper into the island, Pi finds freshwater pools, enormous colonies of meerkats (p. 266), forests of trees that seem to grow out of the algae (p. 271) and the meerkats sleep in their branches (pp. 275–6; in the real world, of course, meerkats sleep in underground burrows). Finally Pi finds a tree bearing some very peculiar-looking fruit; each of these, as it turns out, after unwrapping countless layers of leaves, contains a human tooth at its core (pp. 270–80). Pi realizes that the whole island is practically a gigantic predatory organism; the algae on the ground emit some sort of acid at night, which is why the meerkats sleep in the treetops; the acid is mostly intended to kill the fish that happen to swim into their freshwater ponds, but it seems that at some point some other human castaway fell victim to the island as well (pp. 281–3).

Horrified by this discovery, Pi boards his lifeboat (along with the tiger) and sets off again, eventually reaching the coast of Mexico with no further incidents. The tiger promptly disappears into the jungle. The story ends with one last surprise as two Japanese officials come talk to Pi in the hospital, hoping to learn more about what had happened to their ship. They find his story of surviving in the boat with a tiger hard to believe, so he comes up with another, even grislier story; this time, instead of animals, there are several other human survivors: Pi, his mother, an injured sailor, and the ship's cook, who happens to be a brutish Frenchman. The cook kills the injured sailor and then Pi's mother, but is eventually himself killed by Pi. The Japanese officials cannot help noticing that this story corresponds closely to the original one, with Pi's mother standing for the orangutan, the cook for the hyena, the sailor for the zebra, and Pi for the tiger. They decide they that they liked the animal version better after all.

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I don't pretend to have any clear idea of what to make of any of these things. Is Pi's second story the true one, while the first one (with the tiger and all the other animals) was just a big hallucination? Or a deliberate lie? Pi, at the end of the book, doesn't seem to care very much about which story is true; they are both simply stories to him. I suppose this is very postmodern and all, and will no doubt meet with much approval from certain circles, but it feels very frustrating for a simple-minded reader like myself.

I was also not sure what to make of the bizarre meerkat-infested island of acid-secreting algae. There is a fine line between ‘rich imagination’ and ‘throwing out one damn random thing after another’, and I couldn't help feeling that the author oversteps it a little from time to time. And of course you can't help noticing the religious aspect of the whole thing; surely the island, with its abundance of food and water provided by the algae, and its lack of any predators, is meant to resemble the earthly paradise of christian mythology, with Pi as a modern-day Adam who eventually has to flee from it after plucking that grisly tooth-bearing fruit from a tree. But why would that whole thing have to be there, at that point in this story? How does it fit into anything else? Why does Mr. Adirubasamy at the start of the novel say that this story would “make you believe in God” (p. xii)?

Clearly, religion is meant to have a certain presence in this novel, but I don't really understand what we're supposed to make of it. The author isn't exactly preaching at us, and I find it hard to imagine that reading this novel would convert anyone to anything. Any why, if he wanted us to become interested in religion, would he always take such care to provide (just barely) rational explanations for everything that happens in the novel?

But I shouldn't complain too much; overall this book was a very pleasant read, I enjoyed the earlier and middle parts of it a great deal, and the things that remain unexplained (to me at least) do not really get too much in the way of a good story of survival at sea, told by a storyteller with a delightful, sparkling imagination.

BOOK: J. M. Coetzee, "Waiting for the Barbarians"

J. M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999 (first published in 1980). 0140283358. 152 pp.

This book is another welcome piece of evidence for my old theory that Nobel laureates write surprisingly good books. I had heard of Coetzee before but hadn't really been planning to read any of his books; I heard of this short novel of his, first published in 1980, very recently and purely by chance. I was looking for something about Sven Hedin, the famous Swedish explorer of Central Asia from the late 19th and early 20th century, and came across a very interesting article (H. Wittenbert, K. Highman: “Sven Hedin's ‘vanished country’: Setting and history in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians”; link 1, link 2) about Hedin's influence on the setting of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. Although Coetzee's book is deliberately vague about where and when exactly it's taking place, apparently he took a lot of inspiration from Hedin's (and other explorers') descriptions of certain areas of Central Asia, especially of the long-ruined city of Lou-lan that Hedin discovered in 1901 near the lake of Lop Nor. At the same time, I guess that another major inspiration for the novel was the way the South African authorities treated the blacks under the apartheid system.

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The story is told by a first-person narrator, who like most characters in the story remains unnamed. He used to be the magistrate, i.e. the head of the civil administration, of a small town at the very edges of some unnamed Empire. It used to be quite an idyllic existence — a sleepy, peaceful place (it didn't even have a prison), with not too much work for an administrator like him, so he could spend plenty of time on visiting friends, mistresses (he is an older man and a widower, and doesn't seem to have any children), and on his various hobbies such as hunting, reading “the classics”, and antiquarianism — he likes to conduct excavations in the nearby ruins of an ancient city, and occasionally tries to decipher the inscriptions he found there. (This is probably the point where Coetzee was the most directly influenced by Hedin's discoveries. There is also the more general environmental influence: the area where the story is set seems to be relatively dry, though the settlement itself is in something of an oasis; there are cold winters and hot summers. A “tiger rampant” is mentioned at one point among the symbols of the Empire, which is more or less the only thing specifically linking it to an Asian setting. One thing which somewhat surprised me is that the characters use firearms (of a relatively primitive sort), which felt almost anachronistic since everything else in the novel looks like it could easily have taken place at least two thousand years ago.)

Theoretically, the Empire ends there and beyond it there are barbarians, but they are far from being dangerous raging hordes. They are in fact only small harmless groups of nomads, who trade with the Magistrate's settlement often, invariably get stiffed in the process by the locals who hate them, and yet the never cause any real trouble.

The novel opens at a point when this peaceful existence is coming to an end. Supposedly a major barbarian invasion is looming, and on the basis of this claim some sort of emergency measures have been imposed in the Empire, most of the usual process of law has been suspended and a sort of gestapo-like police organization called the ‘Third Bureau’ is now basically running around with unlimited powers. At the start of the novel, a group of Third Bureau men led by a Colonel Joll has arrived at the Magistrate's settlement, supposedly to investigate the barbarian situation with a view to preparing a subsequent military campaign against them. Joll et al. are invariably grotesquely sadistic and arrogant, their methods of investigation consist more or less entirely of torture and over-the-top brutality, and it soon becomes obvious that far from protecting the Empire from the barbarian threat, they are in fact making the situation worse.

Joll arrests a few barbarians who happen to have been in the vicinity at the time, and tortures them mercilessly to get them to disclose their (obviously non-existent) invasion plans. Naturally, this sort of treatment can only make the barbarians more likely to turn hostile, rather than less. After Joll returns back to the capital to prepare the next phases of the anti-barbarian campaign, it's left to the Magistrate to try picking up the pieces and mending the relations with the barbarians again — after all, it's he and his fellow townspeople that have to actually live next to them.

The Magistrate even takes in a young barbarian woman that has been lamed and partly blinded by Joll and his torturers. Their relationship can, I guess, best be described the way they say on facebook — ‘it's complicated’. At times he treats her as his mistress, at times he just wants to help her recover, and much of the time he himself doesn't seem to be quite sure what he expects from his relationship with her. The novel spends quite a lot of time on these things, which I think goes to show that it's serious literature and not merely an entertaining genre novel. No doubt this is very good stuff for the right sort of readers, but for myself I didn't quite know what to do with most of the Magistrate's internal ruminations on this subject. Fortunately the writer knows how to dose them in moderate quantities so they never get tedious.

After a good few months, perhaps almost a year, the Magistrate decides to take the young woman back to the nearest barbarian encampment, so that she can decide if she wants to stay there (and they can hopefully help her get back to her family) or return to the settlement with him (though it seems that he is growing a bit bored with her). She decides to stay with the barbarians, and when the Magistrate returns to the settlement — the whole journey took a couple of weeks at least — it turns out that things have changed dramatically in his absence. Joll's goons are back in town and they arrest the Magistrate on the suspicion that the purpose of his trip was really to warn the barbarians of the impending large-scale military campaign against them. It is of course easy for them to torture people into providing all sorts of incriminating testimony against the Magistrate, much of it blatantly false, some of it perhaps fueled by honest resentments about his close relationship with the young barbarian woman (and claims that he had been neglecting his administrative work because of her).

The Magistrate demands a trial, but they have no interest in that. They do in fact at times conduct trials of the cangaroo-court type, but under their emergency powers they don't even have to do that, and they simply keep the Magistrate in prison and torture him regularly, presumably for no other reason than that they are evil and that they figure it's the best way to assert their power. This part of the story felt rather nauseating at times, so I think the author did a very good job at conveying how repugnant their behaviour is. I was reminded a little of Orwell here — the purpose of torture is torture, the boot stomping on a human face, etc.

Joll himself is actually away campaigning most of this time, and it's an underling of his named Mandel that runs things is absence. This is in fact one of the very few named characters besides Joll in this book, and I was somewhat surprised by the choice of name. “Joll” sounds vague and nondescript and could be from many parts of the world, but “Mandel” strikes me as distinctly Jewish, which seemed to me to be a somewhat odd choice given the setting of the novel.

As the whole story is told from the Magistrate's first-person perspective, we tend not to hear much about things that he didn't know himself. The details of the campaign against the barbarians are unclear, but evidently it isn't going well. Either a serious barbarian invasion force must have existed to begin with, or (more likely in my opinion) the brutality of Joll and the likes of him must have provoked the barbarians into a serious opposition. Still, we see very little of this supposed formidable barbarian force here. At one point Joll rolls into the town with a dozen wretched barbarian prisoners, and we cannot help realizing that, even if a real barbarian army exists somewhere out there, these people obviously cannot have anything to do with it. They must have been some unfortunates who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and whom he arrested simply as a way to cover up the failures of his campaign. Joll's men proceed to flog the prisoners brutally in the public square (makes you wonder who's the real barbarian here), to much delight of the assembled civilian population, except for the Magistrate, who tries to protest loudly, only to get badly beaten up himself by Joll's goons.

After a while, Mandel releases the Magistrate, perhaps because he figures that at this point this is the best way to continue demonstrating the Third Bureau's power: they are so powerful and the Magistrate so weak that they can afford to let him roam around freely, as a homeless beggar. He slowly re-establishes contact with old acquaintances and finds that people have a good deal of sympathy for him, and dislike for Joll's men, but of course everyone tries to keep their heads down most of the time.

As rumours of the disastrous failure of the anti-barbarian campaign mount up, morale in the settlement grows worse, more and more people leave for the interior of the Empire in search of safety, and Mandel's garrison treats the remaining civilians increasingly badly. The settlement is slowly losing not only its population but also the societal structures that enabled it to function as a town at all. The inn shuts down, the school shuts down, etc. Eventually the garrison leaves as well, ostensibly as a temporary measure, but it's clear to everyone that the Empire is abandoning the settlement due to its inability to defend it. A little later Joll and the tattered remnants of his forces pass through the town as well, in a further proof that their campaign must have ended in disaster. The townsfolk are now left to their own devices, trying to make it through the next winter, cope with the loss of population, carry on farming despite the ever-present barbarian threat, etc. The Magistrate informally takes lead of many of these efforts, thus slipping into something resembling his old role again.

The novel ends before we could see how things will really turn out. Will a large barbarian force eventually turn up and wipe out the town in an orgy of fire and blood? Or has it all been a giant phantasmagoria and will the frontier go back to its sleepy, peaceful days now that the Third Bureau troublemakers are gone? Will the town be able to recover from the loss of population and environmental devastation (the barbarians have flooded some areas by messing with irrigation systems, and Joll's soldiers have burned down other areas ostensibly because they could provide cover to barbarian guerillas)? Or will it enter into a slow (or not so slow) decline and soon turn into a ruin not unlike the one that the Magistrate has had so much fun excavating in the happier days of peace? The last scene is on a sort of life-goes-on note: the magistrate passes by a group of children that are making a snowman.

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I really enjoyed this novel, except, as I already mentioned above, for the torture parts, which made me queasy. It raises many interesting questions about civilisation, imperialism, even environmentalism. The settlement in which most of the story takes place was built up by the Empire about a hundred years ago, on land where formerly the barbarian nomads used to graze their herds. It's a story as old as farming (so about ten thousand years) — farmers pushing pastoralists out of their lands. It's despicable, but you can't help feeling a hypocrite for condemning it, since the vast majority of humankind nowadays lives in civilizations based on farming rather than nomadic animal husbandry. Apart from this ‘original sin’, as it were, the townsfolk don't seem like a particularly bad sort, and the Magistrate's description of life in the old days of peace and prosperity seems fairly idyllic, which makes it hard to see the setting up of a town like that as wholly bad. But that's precisely what makes civilization so insidious, of course; its good sides are just attractive enough to easily lure us into excusing the abuse and injustice that inevitably lies at its foundation.

There's an interesting environmental aspect to the story as well, although it doesn't have such a prominent part in it. The settlers have built irrigation systems to support their farming, and this perhaps draws more water than the environment can provide: the water in a nearby lake is turning more and more salty — which is beginning to reach the point where fishing will soon be impossible — and the Magistrate himself observes that sooner or later farming may become impossible as well, and the settlement may have to be abandoned. He points out that the barbarians haven't forgotten that it is a relatively recent establishment, and you can sense that they are hanging around waiting for the settlement to fail due to an ecological disaster so they can go back to grazing their herds in the area again. I imagine the author was inspired partly by actual historical examples of abandoned cities, such as the one near Lop Nor mentioned above, and partly by environmental concerns in his own time (1970s) and place (Africa).

Another intriguing topic that the novel explores is the relationship between the centre and the periphery. The novel here consistently takes place at the very edge of the Empire, and seen from this perspective it almost makes you wonder whether there's any point to the centre even existing at all. There are many vague references to the capital of the Empire, and the Magistrate seems to have lived there himself earlier in his career, but now there's nothing but trouble coming out of there — absurd, dangerous decisions such as the one to impose emergency measures, to let the Third Bureau run rampant, to organize a supposed anti-barbarian campaign even though it is plainly obvious (to people such as the Magistrate, who lives on the periphery himself and thus knows the situation there) that no barbarian invasion is looming (and it must have either been a terrible mistake by short-signed, ignorant leadership in the capital, or a cynical fabrication set up by the Third Bureau itself so they would have an excuse to seize power). The Magistrate himself says clearly enough on a number of occasions that nothing would suit him and his fellow townsfolk better than if the Empire and its capital simply forgot about them and let them keep on living their peaceful, sleepy existence as heretofore.

It's a very alluring idea, though of course one cannot help also being aware of its possible downsides (which the Magistrate doesn't say anything about). Suppose you were to radically decentralize the Empire so that each little settlement (such as the one where this novel takes place) becomes completely autonomous. Would this usher in an era of peace and prosperity, or one of constant internecine warfare? (We all know about endlessly squabbling city-states from various periods of history and various parts of the world, after all.) And then there's trade — a part, at least, of the prosperity of the settlement surely relies on trade with the rest of the Empire; with the Empire gone, wouldn't such long-distance trade links wither and die, leading to a slow decline in the standards of living and indeed in the level of civilization itself? (Isn't this exactly what happened in the (western parts of the) Roman Empire in the late antiquity?) If each settlement were left entirely to its own devices, couldn't the barbarians easily crush them one by one? And in general you need a certain level of population to maintain a certain level of civilization. Could sufficiently wise administrators with a sufficiently broad outlook, such as the Magistrate of this story, be brought up and trained in his tiny frontier settlement? Would the classics that he likes to read be likely to have been written (or even just copied) in it? Or were all these things available only because the settlement was part of a larger political and civilizational unit?

I don't pretend to have a good answer to any of this, of course, and I doubt that the novel would claim to have any answers either. I suppose that, as with many other political questions, there is no simple and elegant solution. Different problems might call for different degrees of integration or decentralization. It's something that people have been grappling with throughout history. Personally I'm afraid that the pressure of economic forces nowadays is pushing us too far in the direction of integration, but then allowing local forces to run rampant in the name of decentralization has its own fair share of problems as well.

Frankly, I think the biggest problem with the Empire in this novel is its willingness to impose emergency measures. This is where all the trouble in this novel starts from. We don't really learn anything much about the politics of the Empire, so it's hard to say what other problems it might have; but we know from history — or, indeed, the present — that republics and more or less democratic countries can also easily fall to the allure of emergency measures. Seriously, if I was every called upon to write the constitution of a country, I think I would insert something like this after every other paragraph: “Oh, and by the way, there will be no emergency measures in this country. Not even if you call them something else. Not even if you think you have an excellent excuse for this. Not even if there are actual physical barbarians running through your parliament building right now and stabbing the deputies with swords while they are trying to carry on with regular parliamentary procedures — no, not even then. In fact, especially not then. No emergency measures for you, full stop. Because fuck you and your poorly-concealed totalitarian impulses, that's why.”

Another question, which is really quite independent of whether your country is an empire or something more democratic, is that of interactions between groups of people at vastly different levels of civilization. If, instead of the tattered bands of barbarian wretches, the Empire in this story were facing another similar empire at the same level of development, they would either have to treat each other roughly as equals in order to trade peacefully, or they would have to go to a real war, a total war that really affects the whole country, and not one of these despicable colonial border skirmishes where the imperialists have a jolly good time brutalizing the vastly smaller, weaker, technologically and organizationally inferior natives. There would be much less room in that kind of world for small-minded sadists like Joll and his cheap acts of torture against hapless random civilians. In any case, in my ideal world, people would simply leave other civilizations alone if there was a mismatch in the level of development. Dealing with a civilization far below yours cannot possibly avoid hurting them, so it would be best to just leave them alone and they will eventually develop on their own terms, if they feel inclined to do so.

That being said, it was in fact very nice to see that the conflict between the Empire and the barbarians in this novel actually ends with a victory for the barbarians. I was a bit surprised by that, but perhaps it is simply informed by the author's experiences. After all, the nineteenth century, when the European colonialists scrambled for Africa and easily lorded it over primitive native tribes, was long gone by the time this story was written; the recent and formative experience for the author must have been the period of decolonization in the mid-20th century, when Empires were collapsing and retreating almost everywhere. The few efforts to prolong this sort of imperialism beyond its alotted historical period simply led to worse and worse forms of abuse and torture, which I guess the author had plenty of opportunity to observe first-hand in apartheid-era South Africa.

Apart from these big political and historical questions, there is also another, more personal side to the novel. The Magistrate is grappling with his relations to women, his growing old, his declining libido, his efforts to understand how people like Joll and Mandel can live with themselves, how the masses of the people can remain silent in the face of their actions and thus in a sense become complicit in them, etc. I'm not really equipped to comment on any of these things, so I'll just content myself with noting that they feature prominently in the novel and will no doubt be appreciated by people who can appreciate this sort of things.

All in all, this was a delightful, if at times very uncomfortable, novel, hard to put down, and I particularly liked the random, serendipitous way in which I had come across it. I wonder how many more gems like this are waiting to be discovered in places where I would never think to look for them because I tend to avoid the work of modern serious authors for the simple reason that most of it is incomprehensible (and hence boring) to me. I can only hope for other such lucky encounters in the future.

[Update: a few years after reading this novel, I found out that there exists a poem of the same title, and on a similar theme, by C. P. Cavafy. It was first published in 1904 and its wikipedia page mentions it as an influence on Coetzee's novel.]