764 Reviews the metaphors of metaphysics and to the parallel between a putative God's putative relationship with his creation, and to the author's with hers. University of Leicester Martin Stannard On Modern British Fiction. Ed. by Zachary Leader. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. viii+ 319 pp. ?14.99. ISBN 0-19-924932-6. Zachary Leader offers for our perusal an eclectic, engaging, if uneven collection of essays drawn froma conference on 'The Novel in Britain, 1950-2000' in Californiain 2000. The broad remit given his authors?tradition, nationality, genre, the market? seeks to establish a view of British fiction through what Leader identifies as the 'important or suggestive instances and examples' rather than any comprehensive sur? vey ofthe field. As befitsan anthology on 'modern British fiction' these essays attest to the inclusivity and elasticity of 'British' as a unifying term, while always alerting us to its modulations and rules of inclusion and exclusion in 'the modern period' (defined as after 1950), a term self-consciously chosen over 'post-war' to signal what Leader terms 'a new dispensation: new writers, new issues, new forms, a new world' (p. 2). Equally alive to the tensions and textures in and between Englishness and Britishness, not surprisingly, these essays also travel widely across a range of locations (Scotland, Ire? land, Africa, India, the Caribbean), genres (science fiction, detective, fiction, 'ladlit', vernacular fiction), and in practice some span the breadth of the twentieth century despite the seemingly categorical division (1950-2000) of the conference title. They offermuch that is of interest to that elusive creature, the general reader, as to the academic reader. Liam Mclllvanny's essay on 'The Politics of Narrative in the Post-War Scottish Novel' enacts a productive (re)placing of Muriel Spark's interrogation of form and authority within the more local and familiar assault on (political) authority profferedby Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, and James Kelman, while Patrick Parrinder's review of the 'ruined futures' of British science fiction adopts a similarly wide but no less stringent overview in his focus on the genre. Often and perhaps be? cause ofthe straddling of readerships noted and the broad audience imagined forthe conference itself,the essays can seem to cover well-trodden ground, in, say, Michael Wood's reading of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie for the 'details of living in the world of empire and its aftermath' (p. 78), or Hilary Mantel's self-reflexive and lively debate on the British writer's negotiation with Europe. Katherine Bucknell's revisiting of Christopher Isherwood's American afterlives, on firstglance, continues this trend, but her access to and intimacy with his diaries in particular revivifies Isherwood, illuminating further his relationship with writers like Virginia Woolf, in contrast to the usual comparison with W. H. Auden or Stephen Spender. It also clearly traces the line of Isherwood's engagement with gay politics in later writing in and across several genres while fillingout the current picture of Isherwood's earlier fiction. Ian McEwan's 'Mother Tongue: A Memoir' seems rather out of kilter with the prevailing carefulness for boundaries. It veers between a moving articulation of the politics of language and its loss to a more indulgent and problematic rendering of his mother's voice. He aims to amplify his own sense of displacement from the colours, salts, and tones of existence that characterize the 'mother tongue' of the title; a mobilization of his own mother's life/language story which is all the more troubling for his mediations of her voice and an overall cloaking in a semi-confessional for? mat not dissimilar to that deployed by Blake Morrison in Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002). It does, however, raise interesting questions about the ethics of (auto)biography, which are not quieted in Martin Amis's slim, elegant, thoughtful, but ultimately rather flaccid essay 'Against Dryness' (taken from an Iris Murdoch MLR, 99.3, 2004 765 essay of the same title), which offers a comparison of the Murdoch centre stage in John Bayley's three act 'tragedy' and Richard Eyre's recent filmIris (2002). Manchester Metropolitan University Julie Mullaney Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott. By Paul Breslin...