Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue is, quite simply, a tour de force. Through the lens of the “fiction of intrigue”—fiction that “foregrounds a threat to the political and social order” (p. 1)—Yumna Siddiqi enables a reorganization and comparison of texts from two literary-historical spaces usually considered disparate: British detective and spy fiction of the late 19^th- and early 20^th centuries, and late-20^th century South Asian novels in English. The fiction of intrigue, Siddiqi contends, expresses and grapples with the tensions and anxieties of Empire—sometimes overtly, sometimes unconsciously—over various phases of imperialism. The sophistication of Siddiqi's analysis ultimately lies in its ability to skillfully conduct an “ideological critique and examin[e] the politics of representation” of such fiction (p. 212) while paying due attention to the narrative strategies and epistemologies that are central to the genre. Confidently weaving together scholarship on Victorian fiction, histories of imperialism, decolonization, and globalization, theories of aesthetics, discussions about subalternity and historiography in South Asian Studies, and contemporary postcolonial theory, Siddiqi makes a important contribution to current theoretical debates about imperialism/Empire, the status of historicism, and notions of truth and knowledge.

Anxieties of Empire is divided into two parts, examining colonial and postcolonial fictions of intrigue respectively. The early chapters establish that British detective and spy fiction ought to be historicized in the same way that we now read “imperial fiction”—fiction that is explicitly “set in Empire, and demonstrates the superiority of colonial culture and the triumph of British hegemony vis-à-vis a native Other” (p. 18). Siddiqi documents the manifold ways in which detective and spy fiction, too, are haunted by the colonized Other. Their strategies of characterization, setting, and plot often address problems raised by Empire (the “possible ungovernability of colonial subjects” (p. 50), inter-racial loves and biracial children, the return of poor white colonials, the dangerous seductions of the East), and the texts aim to assert mastery over such threats, often through the anthropological and ethnographical expertise of the detective/spy.

Nevertheless, Siddiqi argues, the colonial Other can never be fully repressed. For the colonial fictions of intrigue are immersed in the great paradox of the late-19^th century, when, in the decades after the Indian Revolt (“Mutiny”) of 1857 and other anticolonial insurgencies, “a deep gloom about Britain's imperial destiny coexisted with a jingoistic celebration of imperial values and imperial might” (p. 27). Thus, for example, Doyle's “The Green Flag” and Buchan's Prester John reveal and are “energized by the contradictions of Empire”—through their overt goal is to follow standard “codes of counter-insurgency” (p. 87, 114; following Ranajit Guha) and re-establish coherent imperial narratives. The critical brilliance and deep internationalist politics of Anxieties of Empire is revealed in close readings like that of “The Green Flag” in Chapter 4. Siddiqi grounds her critique of the text's ideology in its resolution of the nationalistic impulses of Irish soldiers involved in British counter-insurgency operations in North Africa, thus suggesting that British imperialism, as a material structure and an ideology, was as much about enforcing class, gender, and ethnic hierarchies within Great Britain as it was about controlling the colonies. “Anxieties of Empire” were, at once, “anxieties of home.”

The second half of Anxieties of Empire, devoted to postcolonial literature, involves a sharp methodological shift that readers may wish to interrogate. If the book initially “reads against the grain” of Doyle, Buchan, and others (p. 104) in order to draw out their unconscious critiques of Empire despite overt support for it, it then largely reads with Ghosh, Ondaatje, Roy, and Rushdie, regarding them, as it were, as theorists of the postcolonial. Siddiqi explains that postcolonial fictions of intrigue also, like their colonial counterparts, “foreground the state's anxieties about order and control,” but “[r]ather than confirm the legitimacy of the state […] they interrogate the state's repressive actions” (p. 138). For instance, Ghosh's The Circle of Reason “turn[s] the generic conventions of police fiction upside down” and “critiques the repressive tendencies of Enlightenment reason” (p. 142). Roy's The God of Small Things and Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, while ideologically divergent on questions of the nation and of politics in general, reveal the state to be “a threat to particularity and plurality” (p. 169) and question “the state's mode of vision” (p. 189; following James Scott) in the context of rising communalism in late 20^th century India.

Siddiqi never resolves, in my view, the tension between her historicist critical methodology and her foregrounding of theories that are explicitly anti-historicist—though she explicitly foregrounds this dichotomy in her critique of Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost and its turn away from history (pp. 206–7). Nevertheless, Anxieties of Empire's historicism and its nuanced articulation of the questions involved place it in good company with recent texts like Gautam Chakravarty's The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Helen Scott's Caribbean Women's Writing and Globalization (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), and Julia Wright's Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Above all, the questions about culture, Empire, and modernity that Siddiqi raises are necessary ones to ask in a world where imperialism, in various forms, continues to thrive—but revolts, in various forms, also come into being.