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British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire Sam Goodman New York: Routledge, 2016 xi+185 pp. $148.00
Sam Goodman's British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire is both a literary critique of postwar British spy fiction and an analysis of how Britain coped with the loss of its dominions and the erosion of its international standing. Informed by Michel Foucault's reading, in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, of Thomas Hobbes's conception of sovereign power, Goodman sets out to explore the connection between espionage narratives and empire through their negotiation of spatiality, since the "representation of imperial decline in the spy novel means that space intersects directly with notions of sovereign power and national identity" (7). The goal of Goodman's study is to analyze "how competing forces produce hybrid spaces and hybrid identities within post-war spy fiction; as the empire continues its transition from pre-eminence to dissolution, spaces and the definitions of Britishness within them alter and are altered accordingly" (9). He concentrates on five different environments-occupied European cities, the city of London, the domestic space, vehicles and other means of transportation, and the now-decolonized territories-and the manner in which these are represented in the works of the four most popular spy novelists of the time- Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré, and Len Deighton.
At first, Goodman's decision to examine the end of the empire through the point of view of British secret agents might strike some readers as odd. One would expect more opportunities to engage with this subject would arise from the wide selection of postcolonial literature. Yet Goodman opts to employ a "post-Imperial" and not a postcolonial perspective, examining the effects of decolonization on the...