SOURCE: Bayley, John. “A Passage to Colombo.” New York Review of Books 47, no. 17 (2 November 2000): 44-6.

In the following review, Bayley contrasts the themes, characters, and style of Anil's Ghost to the works of such colonial writers of “the mysterious East” as Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster.

The art of writing about distant places, exotic places, has always been widely practiced in the novel. In the days of “the mysterious East” Kipling and Conrad and many a lesser writer made their reputations in this way. They knew about the East at first hand, but they deployed their knowledge in skillful and colorful ways which would not unduly disturb the naive images of distant places which their home-bound readers had already formed. A fine example is the climax of Conrad's novella Youth, when the crew of a ship burned at sea at last bring their boat into...