Waiting for the Barbarians
An unnamed Empire, an unnamed Magistrate, and the torture of "barbarians" who may pose no actual threat. Coetzee's 1980 allegory applies to every empire that has ever justified atrocity through security. The Magistrate's complicity and then resistance is the most honest portrait of the liberal confronting state violence in contemporary fiction.
An Empire with no name and no date lends the allegory universality at the price of specificity; abstraction this complete can read as evasion, given what was happening in South Africa when Coetzee wrote it. And the barbarian girl, scarred and nearly mute, exists chiefly as a surface for the Magistrate's guilt. His gaze gets the whole book. Hers gets nothing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
