Carlos Fuentes needs little introduction. The hype on the covers of his novels, plays and essays lists his prizes and awards, his global scattering of posts as Mexican ambassador and as professor. It was during his post at Cambridge in 1992—the quincentennial of Columbus' landings—that he delivered the lectures that form the nucleus of these five novellas: perhaps that is why they have a familiar, not to say a jaded, ring.

The Orange Tree is the hand holding these five fingers, dipping into the stages of colonialism that have afflicted the "other" (southern) America. The orange seeds brought to Spain with the Moorish conquest had put down deep roots by the time, 700 years later, that the Inquisition declared in 1492 for the final expulsion of infidels: Arabs and Jews. In the same year, Columbus in his journals was propounding strange theories about how to stand an egg on its end and a pear-shaped world on its stalk or "nipple" at the Equator. Preparing to sail the globe and square the circle, turning the tiny islands of the Caribbean into the great lands of Japan and China, he found himself tossed into the shores of Paradise, "a Jerusalem at the earth's centre."

The orange trees threw out new branches in the new world at the new conquest. For Columbus was but a preliminary skirmish in what became a repetitious war of attrition and possession. The first tale is told in the words of Jerónimo de Aguilar, the Spaniard who survived the first landing on the eastern seaboard of Mexico to become Cortés' interpreter. Soon, however, he found himself superseded by the Janus figure of la Malinche/Marina, the multilingual expert who (in Fuentes' version) superseded even his capacity for treachery and deception.

Having betrayed the Aztec emperor Montezuma with Cortés, la Malinche became the mother of the mestizo race, a new Eve in the Garden of Eden that would decline into being the Valley of Mexico—cradle of the most polluted city in the world.

This fable is so familiar it needs little elaboration. That the "fruit of the tree of knowlege of good and evil" turns out to be an orange is no more a poetic licence than the European convention that it should be an apple. What palls in this New World version of the Old Testament tale is the lameness of the retelling, the limpness where tautness is vital.

The pity of it is not that Fuentes cannot write. He can, if better elsewhere. But his settings, which move from the legacy of Conquest back into Roman Spain and forward into the cheap takeover of the original earthly Paradise by the Japanese-owned Paradise Inc and its programme of "team spirit, Cristóbalsan, company loyalty, yoga every morning, Valium every night", are so predictable. Where the ideas are tired, the writing falters.

Columbus' tropical nipple of the world is Fuentes' nibble at a golden globe, recurring in a crescendo of mammary metaphors. Refusing the role of narrator, putting politics into the mouths of historical characters, Fuentes cannot deflect what emerges as merely banal. Whether the canard that Columbus embodied the Wandering Jew after all, or the attack on the US for its appropriation of the name "America," these well-rehearsed arguments lack originality.

What saves The Orange Tree are the redemptive passages of humour and wit. Sailing over the standard late 20th-century Apocalypse of a world drowning in its own sewage and pollution is the ridiculous reincarnation of Snow White's seven dwarves in a yachting brothel. And trumpeting back at the rhetoric, in the arcane vocabulary of Scipio Aemilianus, are the belligerent elephants of the African king Masinissa. Blessed be the unexpected, along with odd throwaway sentences that recall the best of Fuentes' other incarnations as The Old Gringo or Christopher Unborn.