Essays Reflect Complex World

“Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions” By Pico Iyer (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $25)

Pico Iyer, who has been taking his place among the better-known travel writers and essayists, is a good exemplar of the main idea of “Tropical Classical,” a collection of his various writings. Tropical classical is, as Iyer puts it, a new literary voice “that is beginning to remake the contours of the global village.” Explaining the nature of this voice, Iyer speaks of “the empire striking back, a shorthand for that increasingly visible phenomenon whereby much of the strongest writing in English and especially in England is coming from writers from the former colonies, who are using the words they’ve learned at their masters’ feet to turn their masters’ literature on its head.”

It is a useful concept, especially at a time when the Western mainstream often seems to have exhausted its themes and South America, South Asia and the West Indies seem so full of literary vitality. And Iyer is a logical person to have uncovered it and given it a name. His parents grew up in Bombay; he was born in Oxford, England, educated in Britain and now lives part of the time in California and part in Japan. A contributing editor at Time magazine, which published many of the shorter essays in this collection, Iyer seems to embody that combination of distance and proximity, outsiderness and insiderness, that enables him to inject something new into the master forms.

The best essays in the collection, in this sense, are the earlier ones: Iyer’s travel writing, and his smooth, elegant discussions of the best tropical classical practitioners: Salman Rushdie, R.K. Narayan, Romesh Guneskera and other “foreign” writers who are “flooding the English mainstream with their alien colors and spices and sounds.”

The truth is that the farther Iyer gets away from home, the better he is. Here in America, his ideas, while always elegantly expressed, seem overly elaborate.

Sometimes Iyer puts too much in, the sheer breadth of his collection weakening its thematic focus. Still, this volume is worth its price for the dozen or so essays in which Iyer is at his most brilliant, essays in which he reflects back at us images from a post-colonial world that is gorgeously complex and stubbornly elusive, yet firmly within his grasp.