A Backward Place is very professional light comedy. After Independence, the Europeans have descended on India, investigating, enthusing, simply finding that the country suits them to live in. The author … keeps a tone of affectionate irritation, but keeps it with difficulty. Novels about Asia concentrate too much on invertebrate charm, like novels about college girls married to actors. The over-optimistic, childish, feckless, family-ridden side of the male population can't be the only side there is…. The English wife, who works in a flyblown cultural outfit in Delhi to support her husband while he dreams of astounding his café friends by, say, making a success in films, accepts a world not too different from her lower-class English home, but her ghastly friends do not. Gentle, sadly amusing, this picture of the greatest of all ex-colonial territories makes it seem a picturesque backwater.

R.G.G. Price, in a review...