Black farce very often thrives on stock characters and stock incidents. The grotesque needs the familiar to bounce off. Yet the presence of too many such stock elements suggests that the author's imagination is not actively engaged and instead is being towed along by established literary stereotypes. Throughout The Ponsonby Post there is an embarrassing contrast between the evidence of Bernice Rubens's talent—her irony and zip—and the evidence that in this case we are dealing with slipshod work, not helped by a bumper crop of misprints….

The more the book comes to resemble a thriller and the less a social satire, the more comfortable the author seems….

[The] guerrillas remain curiously beyond criticism, bathed in the soft glow of nineteenth-century holy oleographs. There are rich pickings to be had from the misunderstandings and mutual corruptions which result from these post-colonial collisions between West and East, between...