South Africa may be the world's whipping-boy, but J. M. Coetzee is too intelligent a novelist to cater for moralistic voyeurs. This does not mean that he avoids the social and political crises edging his country towards catastrophe. But he chooses not to handle such themes in the direct, realistic way that writers of older generations, such as Alan Paton, preferred to employ. Instead, Coetzee has developed a symbolic and even allegorical mode of fiction—not to escape the living nightmare of South Africa but to define the psychopathological underlying the sociological, and in doing so to locate the archetypal in the particular. He did this in [In the Heart of the Country] …, which, with its doom-laden action of lust, violence, and revenge, resembles Greek Tragedy seen through a glass darkly. He does it rather differently in his less difficult but also less original new novel, Waiting for...