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Reviewed by:
  • End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 ed. by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz
  • Maria Ridda
Gilmour, Rachael, and Bill Schwarz, eds. 2011. End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press. $95.00 hc. 272pp.

“The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so that they don’t know what it means,” says a stuttering Whisky Sisodia in The Satanic Verses (1988, 343). It is precisely this lacuna in postwar British fiction that the present collection addresses. In the volume’s afterword Elleke Boehmer argues that the revisionary purpose of this collection is to present several examples of “imperial occlusion,” a tendency in postwar fiction to “forget” that the empire is crumbling into pieces (2011, 242). Bill Schwartz argues that the essays also seek to address the role that English insularity and parochialism have played in obscuring colonial realities (5). End of Empire discloses “what occurred historically at the center” by analyzing rearticulations of colonial legacies on a transnational and regional scale (5). The collection foregrounds the literary dialogue between the provincial and the transnational, the social and cultural networks existing on a regional scale and across nations. As James Procter notes, “debates on empire and its aftermath have tended to flicker between metropolitan center and postcolonial periphery while paying scant attention to the internal margins of provincial Englishness” (203). The book seeks to bring into the spotlight the theoretical centrality of marginal discourses located outside the metropolitan context yet participating in the creation of the same cultural and racial dichotomies inherent in the center/periphery opposition.

This collection brings together a number of interventions on the ambivalent attitude toward the fall of empire. It draws on a wide range of texts by canonical writers such as D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell and less well-known authors including William Boyd, Josephine Tey, and David Peace. The essays are organized around four main thematic blocks: the veiled anxiety perceivable in texts that do not explicitly interrogate the consequences of Britain’s decline as an imperial power; a critique of Britain’s insular mentality; the necessity to adopt a comparative stance, bringing together novels by E. M. Foster and Alan Hollinghurst; and the idea that British imperialism is progressively being replaced by the United States’ hegemony in the world.

In the first grouping, Richard Jones focuses upon ways in which John Masters’s novels dealt with key events in the history of India’s decolonization. For example, in Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), the Indian “Mutiny” is regarded as a moment of [End Page 152] “treachery” and “barbarity” by the British hero (132). There is a tendency in these and other novels of the decade to subvert the significance of historical events that take place in the colony. Thus, despite Golding’s commitment in Lord of the Flies to “attack” the “imperialist” ethos, Rachael Gilmour believe that the text tends to create “a historically rooted, culturally homogenous—and by implication, exclusionary—vision of Englishness and English literature” (93).

Essentialist and homogenous notions of national belonging are discussed by Michael Ross in his analysis of Armadillo, in which insular anxiety “rather than imperial nostalgia . . . is the major source of laughter” (131). If Ross’s analysis focuses upon the text’s ability to deride English cultural myopia, Huw Marsh’s reading of Lively’s Moon Tiger suggests a bleaker view of the present, the necessity to revisit the past with stern judgment and “a skeptical eye” (160).

British cultural myopia, as this collection suggests, can be critiqued by comparative methodologies that look at the intertextual relationships between texts. Suzanne Hobson’s essay brings into dialogue two writers separated in time, D. H. Lawrence and Tim Parks, to shed light on the ways in which both authors challenge traditional notions of national belonging. She argues that Parks has been influenced by Lawrence’s ambivalent notion of Englishness, by his idea that “the novel can move beyond the various kinds of reductivism associated with parochialism and its close shadow, imperial nostalgia” (167). Cora Kaplan’s comparison of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair (1948) with Ruth Rendell’s Simisola (1994) focuses on the rewriting...

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