This chapter considers the way the colonialconstructions of subjectivity—within a post-colonialcontext—affect the way women and men judge theirposition in the world and within Britain. Itexamines the forms of behaviour that are consideredpossible in light of those constructions. Thischapter also reviews the topics that were discussedin the previous chapters.

This introductory chapter discusses the process bywhich spatial relations are considered classed,raced and gendered within the imperial and colonialcontexts. It notes that the focus of the study is onthe period of ‘high’ British colonialism during thelast few years of the nineteenth century. Itconsiders the question of spatiality and explainshow the book—and the study—developed. It examinespost-colonial theory, this book's theoreticalposition, and the concepts of space and spatialrelations. This chapter also identifies thedifferent levels of colonial space and discusses thepublic and private spheres, the contact zone, thesexualisation of space, and gender and space.

This chapter takes a look at the way that colonialarchitecture structures the way that spatialrelations are considered. The discussion focuses onthe domestic architecture of the bungalow and theimpact this had on the social relations betweenIndians and the Anglo-Indians. This chapter alsoanalyses the specificity of colonial public anddomestic architecture, while focusing on the waythat these forms of architecture evolved out of acomplex relationship with both indigenous andmetropolitan styles of architecture.

The Tax Inspector is Peter Carey's most savage novel to date, and it captures Karl Marx's vision of the ravening effects of capital. The book takes us full circle back to the power-crazed psychopathic business world of 'War Crimes', but with the unsettling awareness that this is no longer fantasy. Carey paints a vitriolic portrait of social decay and disintegration, the collapse of communal ethics and the sheer rapacity of the business world consequent upon the global market economy of the late 1980s. As in Bliss, he links together two areas of urgent concern, rampant capitalism and child sexual abuse. The brutal story-line is matched by an urgent narrative, almost filmic in intensity, which, along with the urgency of the social issues, marks a dramatic and adventurous shift of direction for Carey's fictional practice.

This chapter takes a look at Proust's anachronisms in Michelangelo and Shakespeare's sonnets. It first studies Michelangelo's sonnets, which follow Proust's fourth instance of anachronism. It then looks at Shakespeare's preoccupation with time, which deals with a sense of crisis. It also looks at one of Shakespeare's characters, Falstaff, a figure who will not be contained.

This chapter introduces the concept of anachronism, which means considering what is out of time and what resists chronology. It first takes a look at deliberate anachronism, a technique that can be found in Don Quixote, and then examines anachronism within the context of historical writing. The next section studies ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, where it explains that to work on any text of the past is anachronistic. The concepts of aphorism and contretemps are also discussed.

Geoffrey Hill's poems have often presented a series of scenes, livid tableaux, ‘spectacles’: the Jews in Europe, the Battle of Towton, the endurances of some poets, Boethius in his cell, the nailer's darg, real and fancied martyrdoms like those of his Sebastians. Hill feels that we are bound by that perpetual paradox of love renewing ‘the battle it was born to lose’. But it is a battle that must be waged for the alternative is death. This is what Harold Bloom calls Hill's ‘desperate humanism’. In Tenebrae, it appears with least equivocation in the poem ‘Christmas Trees’ in praise of the German pastor and opponent of Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeff.

There are many themes in The Triumph of Love. This chapter's reading of the poem is dominated by Hill's effort to grapple with, to honour and in some sense to do justice by, all these unlived and unliveable lives—‘the brute mass and detail of the world’. There is no ‘wondrous story’ readily available in The Triumph of Love. Indeed the word ‘love’ rarely appears, and then in a heavily defended context as though its utterance is hard-won. It might not seem surprising that The Triumph of Love includes a more evidently autobiographical mode than any of his previous work, save perhaps for Mercian Hymns. This appears primarily in childhood recollection, coinciding with the war and immediately postwar years.

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is undoubtedly the strangest of Peter Carey's novels. It marks a return to the overt alternative world-building found in the early stories with their fantastic and fable-like scenarios, and implicit in works like Oscar and Lucinda. On the final page of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Tristan reveals, like the narrator's view of Lucinda at the end of Oscar and Lucinda, that 'although I did not know it, my unusual life was really just beginning'. As if to echo that, Carey has published yet another innovation in his fictional practice, this time into children's literature. The Big Bazoohley takes the idea of adventurous risk-taking as its main idea. The Big Bazoohley of the title refers to the notion of life's big gamble, the main chance, whose existence nine-year-old Sam has absorbed from his gambler father and which Sam succeeds in pulling off.