The empire strikes back. We hear of a threatening entity, the “Pacific rim,” whose principal market we have become. The Japanese have rescued the Treasury from embarrassment. What will it be like, what is it like, to be a “debtor nation”? Dour heads on television warn that in our own immense way we are following Britain toward an age of humbled decline. May it be genteel, so gradual that we hardly notice, on any particular morning, what we can no longer afford. Meanwhile, there remains, at every point of the compass, the expensive, untidy, dangerous heritage of Western imperialism, which we can neither wind up nor wind down. Such is the potential for drama in memories of the colonial scene and in its aftermath—for nostalgia and guilt, bravery and aggression, ironies of manners, morals and language—that inevitably some of the most compelling modern fiction is a post-colonial pondering. Four of the more interesting books that have come my way for this review, all quite unlike each other, unite a fineness of art with post-imperial themes. …

In Jim Crace's Continent, an old Siddilic calligrapher, supreme master of his art, under assault by an irresistible combination of politics and commercialism, comes to think, “The quest for meaning in form belongs to an age long past.” In the best of these tales Crace's writing belies this; he achieves that combination of ease and finish that merits the term classicism, a classicism shaded with Virgilian melancholy. Unfortunately, Crace's publisher, claiming too much for him, is in danger of claiming too little. To arrive at these stories we pass a distracting barrier of publicity hoping to convince us that Continent is a novel (it is not, nor is there any reason why it should be, except, I suppose, that novels receive attention short stories or tales don't); that it is some sort of post-modern favor to compare Crace to writers like Borges and Calvino (it is not); and that his continent is an “invented” place, which “refers as well to the underlands of the human psyche, to the collective unconscious of the human race” (the continent is clearly modern Africa, and it bears the same relation to Crace's stories as does New Mexico to Willa Cather's, Barchester to Trollope's, the classical world to Guy Davenport's—that is, the writer has felt something deeply about it, and has transformed it). “And after reading Continent,” writes a poet manqué at Harper & Row, “we gaze at our imaginations in the same way we gaze into a fire.” Now, now.

The best of these seven stories are about the passing of ancient ways as they became “inconveniences” in the neocolonialized eyes of natives on the make. In “Talking Skull” a student tries to disguise the source of the money that pays for his scientific education, Rome-cut trousers and Spanish-leather shoes: his father sells freemartin's milk (they don't give milk) to country people who believe in its powers of sexual potency and fertility. The student's embarrassment decreases rapidly when a modern businessman shows him how to rationalize his potential inheritance through understanding the continuity between superstition and trade. In “Sins and Virtues” the old calligrapher, whose forgotten art is suddenly fashionable in Paris and Chicago, is forced into elaborate deceptions by government officials wishing to line their Swiss bank accounts. In a wonderfully sad-funny tale, my favorite, electricity comes to a rural village, and with it the wonders of blenders, “table lamps with New York skylines as a friezed motif,” and a catastrophic ceiling fan. You know that as soon as the first switch is pulled, the little town is doomed as surely as the one on Keats's urn. Crace's stories are delicately inventive elegies for the local, the odd, the inefficient, the native, as they give way before international junk and its economic and ideological bases.