Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
The Empire Strikes Back
By Pico Iyer
Reef
by Romesh Gunesekera
New Press, 190 pp., $20.00
The Tempest has become a model for postcolonial fiction. Who, after all, can resist a tale of spirits and savages being tamed and taught by a fugitive European aristocrat (later joined by a mixed-up band of drifters and dreamers and drunkards)? And who could fail to see in it a metaphor for the way in which Western powers have long tried to bring their native ways and speech to untutored paradise islands? Shakespeare's experiment in magic realism offers an ideal prototype for the encounter between the civilized and the wild—or, as it would more often be called today, between two different kinds of civilizations, one drawn from Nature and one from books. It not only acknowledges both the angelic and the bestial sides of the subconscious world but also allows a visiting scholar to perform a kind of mission civilisatrice before returning home.
Review, 3253 words
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