SOURCE: "Postcolonial Gothic: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 85-100.

Newman is a British educator, editor, and critic. In the following essay, she discusses the Gothic elements of Three Continents and its main character, the multi-national murderer Crishi, who resembles the real-life serial killer Charles Sobhraj.

Gothic motifs are exceptionally prevalent in postcolonial fiction, even from very different locations. Classic post-colonial transformations of Gothic emanate from the Caribbean (Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), Africa (Bessie Head's A Question of Power) and India (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust). In Canada, Gothic is almost the norm, whether in Margaret Atwood's comic Lady Oracle, or Anne Hébert's Héloise (the Québecois tale of a vampire who haunts the Paris Metro), or Bharati Mukherjee's Asian-Canadian Jasmine. Not surprisingly, when the heroine of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women thinks...