Empire & the Fiction of Intrigue

In this well-written and scholarly work, Yumna Siddiqi examines two forms of novel, looking for expressions of anxiety that can be interpreted as responses to the experience of colonialism and imperialism. She begins by looking at the popular fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) and John Buchan (1875–1940) and continues her examination with works from an entirely different genre, the modern postcolonial novel, which is, as she says herself, "not precisely popular fiction in the way Buchan and Doyle's stories are." In line with the 1880–1920 period, this review will focus on the first section of her book, but the point should be made that Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue is of two halves separated by an "Intermezzo" chapter attempting to link the older works to the fiction of postcolonial modernity.

Her work on Conan Doyle and Buchan is good. She is rigorous in sticking closely to the texts in her search for evidence and produces a comprehensive discussion of how the genre can be used in a search for contemporary ideas about empire. She uses theoretical approaches in a controlled manner and is particularly perceptive on the role of curiosity and its open-ended possibilities in the spy thriller of empire. Her reading of Buchan's Prester John (1910) makes creative use of other texts to bolster her opinions. Her interpretation of Buchan's conflation of gender identities and political ambition in his novel Greenmantle (1916) is persuasive. However, she also has a less sound understanding of Buchan than she does of Doyle. Buchan was influenced by the sensation novels of his Victorian childhood but was not a sensation writer himself; he was far too literary. Unfortunately, Siddiqi's publishing deadline probably led her to miss the recent discussion of Greenmantle by an Arabic scholar which would have informed her reading of Buchan's depiction of Islam (A. al-Rawi, "Manipulating Muslims in John Buchan's Greenmantle and A. J. Quinnell's The Mahdi: A Pattern of Consistency," The John Buchan Journal, 36 [Spring 2007], 18–32.)

Irritatingly, she conflates "English" with "British" throughout her book, even when discussing the British Empire. For example, she uses "English national space" and "English people," when it is quite clear that "British" is meant. This confused perception of historical and present day identity contrasts with her discussion of writers with Irish and Scottish identity: here Siddiqi does remember that England is only one country in a state consisting of four, and uses correct nomenclature.

In the second part of the book, novels by Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie are discussed as a continuation of Siddiqi's thesis that the fiction of intrigue reveals truths about the experience of colonising and being colonised. Her lenses are quite different: in the first section of the book she uses a magnifying glass, in the other a telescope; but there is not a satisfying explanation as to why she used such different tools in different genres and times. It would seem a lot more logical, and potentially more fruitful, to have stayed in genre or to have stayed in time period. Moving from one to another shifts the debate, and the links between the two halves are not obvious. Detective fiction, spy novels and the idea of the novel of counterinsurgency are the principal foci for part one but are not discussed at all in the second part. The different production types and readerships are indeed quite different for both sets of texts, and the authorial intentions will also have been correspondingly different.

Is this approach useful? The book will be valuable to students of empire as a whole and to specialists in genre fiction, especially to those working on Doyle and on Buchan. A completely separate readership will find Siddiqi's detailed discussions of Ghosh et al. equally useful. Both constituencies may be puzzled at the presence of each other in the implied readership of the book. The answer...