I have always respected D. J. Enright, a useful all-rounder; critic, poet, teacher, novelist. [In Figures of Speech] he has not greatly extended himself: alternatively, as they say, he is 'writing comfortably within his reach.'

I don't mean that the poet-critic is condescending to the wider public. He has achieved real comedy, entertaining, often witty, about intellectual life and love in Bangkok and Tokyo, while making things easy for himself with the sitting targets of cultural nannies, linguistic conferences, genial brothels, old-world diplomats worried by rising human rights, the usual farcical British Council lecture…. Occident and Orient rub noses and produce not sparks, but courteous solecisms, ornate mis-understandings.

The story links George, a casual English lecturer, with a priggish but teachable young Confucian and an attractive Chinese girl from Singapore. They fumble charmingly on the great divides of race, culture, sex, in a tinted atmosphere of well-bred...