Summary
The novel opens with the first encounter between the magistrate and Colonel Joll. Joll is visiting the magistrate’s outpost on the frontier in the western provinces of an unnamed Empire. Joll, we learn, is part of the “The Third Bureau,” which is said to be the most powerful division of the Civil Guard. Joll has come from the capital for a reason that is not yet disclosed. In the first scene, we see Joll’s dark, round sunglasses covering his eyes. The magistrate has never seen sunglasses before in his life. The two men share a flask in the lounge of the hotel where Joll is staying. Joll describes a violent hunt he was on in the provinces years ago where they left a waste of animal carcasses over the hills. The magistrate tells him about fishing in the region. Joll is uninterested. He doesn’t remove his dark sunglasses the entire time. He retires early. The magistrate goes onto the roof and looks and the vast night sky. His outpost is sleepy and tranquil.
Joll wants to see the magistrate’s prisoners. There happen to be two in the prison cell—an old man and his grandson. Usually there are no prisoners there, he says. It’s a coincidence that there happen to be some at the time of Joll’s visit. But there was a raid nearby, something that is also very unusual in the area. These two were picked up on the road afterward. They say they had nothing to do with the raid, but the magistrate doesn’t know. He asks the old man to tell him what happened. The old man addresses him as “Excellency.” He says that he and the boy know nothing of the thieving. They were on their way to find a doctor because the boy has a terrible sore on his arm that won’t heal. This turns out to be true. The magistrate looks under the boy’s bandage and sees an infected wound. Joll wants to be left alone with the prisoners.
The prisoners are tortured by Joll. People in the village claim to hear the screaming, but the magistrate says he heard nothing. He does however have a frank conversation with Joll about torture. He asks Joll how it’s possible to know whether or not you’re getting the truth from someone. Joll describes it as a tone that he’s attuned to hearing.
Joll reports to the magistrate that the old man got violent, a struggle ensued and the man was killed. The magistrate takes a report from a guard and asks the guard if the prisoner’s hands were tied. The guard admits that they were, then he contradicts his claim. The magistrate asks the guard if Joll told him what to say and the guard says that he did.
The boy is still alive. When the magistrate goes in to see him, he finds that the body of his grandfather has been left in the cell with him, sewn into a cloth. The boy is badly beaten and his hands are tied so tightly that they’re swollen. The magistrate gets the prisoner to remove the body with him. He cuts open the cloth and sees the brutalized face of the old man. He returns to the cell, and orders the guard to loosen the binds on the boy’s wrists and to feed him. He tells the boy to give Joll whatever answers he wants.
He reflects on the changes happening. News from the capital had reached him last year—stories of “unrest among the barbarians” (8). But he says that on the frontier, he’s seen nothing of this unrest. He reflects that “once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home…” (8). He here gives more context for Joll’s visit, explaining that in the capital the fear was that the barbarians of different regions were uniting. The Third Bureau of the Civil Guard (Joll’s division) thus arrived on the frontier for the first time.
The magistrate narrates a dream of children playing in the snow.
The magistrate visits the boy in the prison who has been brutally tortured. He’s covered in wounds from a knife. The guard describes how they used a knife on him as if turning a key. The boy confessed to be being part of the raid and the magistrate asks the boy if he knows what this means: Joll will now go after the boy’s people.
Joll plans to go raid the nomad territory. He plans to take thirty of the magistrate’s garrison. The magistrate tries to dissuade him, but he is determined to get nomads. He’ll take the boy as a guide. The night before they leave the soldiers stay up drinking. The magistrate is disturbed. In the morning he rides out with Joll. Joll rides in a small black, two-wheeled carriage. He wears his black sunglasses. He has no interest in any of the magistrate’s advice. After the magistrate sees them off, he returns to the town. On his way he stops by the ruins of an ancient village that he has been excavating over the years. It’s seems like an old outpost not unlike his own. It has been buried in sand.
Four days after Joll leaves, some of the soldiers return with the first of their prisoners. But they are fisher people. The magistrate is enraged that they’ve been taken hostage. The soldiers explain that they were captured simply because they hid when they saw the expedition coming. The fisher people are parched and exhausted. The entire town has come out to see them. Joll has ordered they be kept until his return. The magistrate installs them in the courtyard of his building. He demands that they be fed. They settle in over the passing days and seem to enjoy the food they’re receiving. They get comfortable. But they have no latrines and a stench begins to arise from the courtyard.
A few days later Joll returns in his black carriage. He has more prisoners. These ones are nomads. They’re tied by the neck. Joll sleeps for over a day. Then he begins his “interrogations.” He has immense stamina for torture. When he’s done with the prisoners he has them installed in the barracks. As the torture happens, the magistrate shuts himself in his rooms. Then he goes to the inn. He spends his nights there sleeping with a young woman. Every morning when he wakes up, the woman is on the floor. It seems that he has kicked her out of the bed in his sleep.
Joll comes to the magistrate’s office and announces that he’s going to return to the capital to submit his report. The magistrate tries to conceal his joy. He asks Joll about the success of his interrogations. Joll tells him that considering the same thing is being done in different locations across the frontier, it has been a success.
The magistrate goes to visit the prisoners. He shouts at the soldiers to clean the filthy barracks out. The crowd of prisoners are traumatized and damaged, though the magistrate doesn’t go into detail describing them. He fleetingly imagines killing them and burying them in a pit as though to take care of the damage. He demands that they be cleaned and fed and that the doctor see to them. He wants them to return to their former lives “as far as possible” (25).
Analysis
The uncanny tranquility of the magistrate’s imperial outpost is disturbed by the arrival of Colonel Joll, a man who represents a new aspect of the Empire, of which the magistrate believes himself a loyal servant. Joll's hyperbolically dark characterization symbolizes this new stage of Empire. Joll is almost a caricature of a villain, with his black eyeshades and black carriage, a man forever concealed. The magistrate, who is devoted to his Empire, is unsettled by Joll. He’s unable to embrace his vision for the Empire; he has a different idea of what it’s about than Joll does. Joll quickly has the upper hand in their dynamic. Though the magistrate doesn’t explicitly state it, he reveals his intimidation to Joll.
One important difference between the magistrate’s old ways and Joll’s new ones, is that Joll has a personal interest in torture, whereas the magistrate prefers to keep it out of sight: for when the magistrate takes Joll to see the prisoners that he happens to have in his cells (a coincidence, he claims), he finds them neglected, filthy and beaten already. The magistrate asks the guard what happened to them, as though he sincerely has no idea that they’ve been kept in these conditions; and yet they’re his prisoners! He’s the magistrate, the judge. He says they claim that they were on their way to see a doctor. This story seems accurate, yet he’s only finding this out now. He offers no narrative explanation as to how long he intended to keep them. It’s an unfortunate coincidence that he has them at all, for when Joll takes over, their situation becomes hopeless. By the third page of the book, Joll is torturing the magistrate’s prisoners.
The magistrate expresses dismay at Joll’s use of torture. He argues with Joll about its effectiveness in getting “truth” from prisoners. In this discussion he reveals a naïve belief in the integrity of Joll and the Empire—as though he sincerely believes that “truth” is what Joll is actually after—and not something simply sadistic and cruel. The magistrate doesn’t consider that Joll’s interest torture has nothing to do with acquiring actual truth at all.
The magistrate wants to remain in a state of ignorance and what he feels to be “peace.” He doesn’t want to be faced with the realities of the violence of his own Empire. His dilemma is that of a liberal beneficiary of a violent empire. With the arrival of Joll comes the arrival of the truth behind the magistrate’s privilege. Times of peace are thus times of ignorance.
It should be noted that the magistrate is not a reliable narrator. Little by little he discloses knowledge that he has previously withheld. Perhaps he’s been in denial. Denial is certainly in important aspect of his character that manifests through the novel. But after expressing dismay at Joll’s use of torture and his mystification as to why Joll is there, he lets on that he has in fact already heard about “troubles” in the Empire. Raids have happened in different regions and there’s fear that the different nomad groups may be banding together. He thus reveals that he has some knowledge of something coming; and he reveals that this isn’t the first time there have been waves of “fear” of “barbarians.” He claims that it happens once in a generation. He describes the nature of the fear of “barbarian” hands slipping into the covers of white women, etc. He interprets this generational fear of “barbarians” as being “the consequence of too much ease” (8).
This striking reflection on the nature of peacetime and the interrelation between a colonizer and their subjects stands out from the magistrate’s narrative. Through the magistrate, Coetzee offers an interpretation of cyclical violence, not merely as a law-keeping process, but as something connected to fear itself. The idea of violence as “a consequence of too much ease” runs against the idea of violence stemming from concrete causes. The source of the generational waves of colonial violence would seem to be deeply psychological, coming from those with the greater degree of power. According to the magistrate’s observation, it’s the fear of being attacked that causes the Empire to attack. The cause is thus not as Joll and the Third Bureau of the Civil Guard claim when they say there have been “raids.” A wave of violence, the magistrate suggests, returns to each generation as the result of a projection, or a psychic break on the part of the Empire. It’s those who fear the “barbarian,” who are indeed “waiting for the barbarian,” who create the barbarian—that is, the enemy.
When the magistrate sees Joll out into the desert on his first campaign, Joll has no interest in the magistrate’s maps or directions. In this way, Joll reveals that he’s not going out to seek a specific enemy. He’s not trying to locate actual criminals who allegedly committed a raid on a nearby post. He’s going to find bodies—any bodies. It’s entirely arbitrary whose bodies they are. He is fulfilling a thirst of the Empire to capture and torture the “barbarian,” the “other,” and by inflicting this unnecessary violence, to quell the Empire’s deep psychological fear.
When Joll returns, he begins torturing each of the prisoners one by one. His pretext for his “interrogations” is that he’s on a quest for truth. But he makes little effort to justify this. As he gets down to work with the “interrogations” and as the peoples’ screams can be heard, the magistrate shuts his ears and hides himself in the inn. He tries not to know what’s happening. His capacity for denial is dramatized at the same time as Joll systematically takes every prisoner and transforms them from a healthy, upright individual into something degraded and broken. As he does this, it becomes apparent that his quest for “truth” is something more akin to an voracious appetite for sadistic violence, a hungry, even sexual drive that he personally, and the Empire more broadly, aims to satiate.
When Joll is done and ready to go back to the capital to write his report, the magistrate asks him if his torture has been a success. Joll claims that it has. But this is not because of what he has done to the individuals. It’s been successful, rather, because it’s being done in different locations across the Empire—that is to say, it’s a campaign, part of something much more widespread. The wave of fear that the magistrate has seen rise and fall with each generation is in this way becoming harnessed and organized. The difference between the magistrate’s generation and Colonel Joll's is that Joll’s Third Bureau takes the fear and organizes its response to it in a systematic, even mechanized way.
The magistrate’s denial is tightly entwined with his growing awareness. The language in the passage in which Joll commits his tortures is far less descriptive than in other passages, reflecting the magistrate’s experience of denial. For the five days that the prisoners are tortured, he shuts his ears. After Joll leaves, he shuts his eyes. His anger with the soldiers for the mess Joll left in the barracks reflects how deeply upset he actually is by what he has learned about the Empire he serves. This is the problem of having the violence of the empire arrive at his door. He doesn’t want to know what his Empire does in order to maintain its order. He’d be happier having it done elsewhere, but Joll has brought it under his nose and now he must figure out how to proceed.
