England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction by Ann Blake , Leela Ghandi , Sue Thomas (review)

Abstract

TES,34, 2004 283 England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction. By ANN BLAKE, LEELA GHANDI,and SUETHOMAS. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 200I. x + 207 pp. p40. ISBN:0-333-73744-x. Stuart Hall, in a recent radio interview,lamented the irony of cultural shifts.At a time when 'British'has become an acceptable term to many black inhabitants of England, who would resist being described as English, Britain is redefining its 'united kingdom', establishing separate parliaments in its constituent parts, and rejectingthe collective identity implied by 'British'.This kind of mutation, showing self-representationas constantlyin processratherthan as achieved, is the concern of England through Colonial Eyesin Twentieth-Centu?y Fiction. It investigatesthe preoccupation in twentieth-centuryfiction and autobiography with the selving of colonial subjectsas they encounter 'the mother country'.The ongoing processesof negotiation , rejection,and articulationthat characterizethe relationshipbetween England, particularly London as the centre of empire, and colonial and postcolonial immigrantsare traced through a wide-rangingcollection of texts. The book's comparativefocus is enlightening.PartI, 'Mapping Some Territory', surveys the variety of ways in which literary traditions have been transformed by colonial and postcolonial writers who inscribe immigrant experience into, for instance, the domestic novel or the Bildungsroman. Coverage begins at the end of the nineteenth century, with Schreiner and Kipling, and concludes with contemporarywriterssuch as Gurnah and Roy. PartII is composed of studiesof individual authors: Mansfield, Rhys, Stead, Lessing, Naipaul, Emecheta, Rushdie, and Dabydeen. Perhaps in keeping with the contingent nature of the project, there is no conclusion;there could have been some gesture towards the new generation of writers born in Britain to immigrant families, whose agenda as both writers and critics is differentfrom that of the parental generation. The impressive coverage of texts from different times and places presents the authors with discursiveproblems. Their methodology pivots on giving plot summaries of the texts they discuss which provides in places a cumbersome reading experience. The summaryis itselfalwaysan interpretation,which sometimes seems tailored to make it fit the argument. The account of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' asserts that 'nothing is available to them except an intermittent sense of disappointment and loss' (p. 86). This omits the daughters' repressed sense of humour which makes the story both poignant and a comic tourdeforce.Similarly, the savage comedy of Naipaul's fiction, one of its most manipulative effects, is marginalizedin the interestsof sustaininga persuasiveargument about the reversal of the imperialgaze, as the colonized subjectcomparesfantasiesabout England and the Englishwith the opportunityto observe the reality. The book's argument is subtle and nuanced, approached slightly differentlyby each of the three authors.Some spikyobstaclesto the complex flow of the discussion are smoothed rather too sweepinglyout of the way; fiction by English writersis a case in point. To describe Graham Greene andJoyce Cary as 'taken up with the niceties of social mobility within a narrow range, and rarely acknowledgingeither non-whites or a working class' (p. 37) is puzzling; how do MisterJohnson,Brighton Rock,and ThePowerandtheGlory fit this paradigm?Similarly,the claim that, until Sillitoe and Braine began to publish, 'English novelists still saw England predominantly as middle-class'(p. 46) ignores the work of Gissingand Lawrence.Though it might be possible to suggest that the writersreplace one national myth of England with another,that of xenophobic greyness,this book is well researchedand presents the reader with an insight into the colonizer colonized. UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING ANGELA SMITH Romancesof the Archivein Contemporary British Fiction. By SUZANNE KEEN. Toronto, Buffalo,NY, and London:Universityof Toronto Press.200I. x + 288 pp. $60; ?40. ISBN: 0-8020-3589-2. Suzanne Keen sets out her stall in an excellent introduction in which she says, among many other things, 'I make every effort to write about fiction in terms that a novel-readercan understandwithout resortingto an encyclopedia of literary terms' (p. 6) and 'this book comes out of decades of pleasure reading' (p. 9), both of which I found refreshingand reassuring;as I went on, I was not to be disappointed - she writesin an approachablestyle,with a minimum ofjargon and very few errors, except for the consistent mis-spellingof 'siege'. From time to time she comes up with marvellousmetaphors, such as the researcher'discoveringoccluded truths and...