SOURCE: "The Empire Strikes Back," in The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, pp. 30-1.

[Iyer is an English-born Indian journalist and critic. In the following review, he analyzes Reef as an example of postcolonial fiction, comparing it to Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1611), Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989), and the work of other contemporary writers from former British colonies.]

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...