But if '' Foe '' presents Coetzee in a new tone, it still maintains continuities of pattern and implication with the earlier novels. Mr. Coetzee has long been occupied with political or administrative systems and the people they exclude or fail to contain. Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.
Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history.
In some of Mr. Coetzee's novels the heroes and heroines express a desire to become a term in a system, but only in a transfigured system and never in the one at hand. There is no act I know of that will liberate me into the world. There is no act I know of that will bring the world into me. That is the origin of our feeling of solitude. I for one do not wish to be at the centre of the world.