Down to earth view of French colonial decay

LOVE AND EMPIRE, by Erik Orsenna, translated by Jeremy Leggatt (Vintage, $72).

IF YOU witnessed Catherine Deneuve's insufferable performance in Indochine and took offence at the film's lamentable depiction of imperialist nostaglie, your unwillingness to countenance another document of French colonial decay is understandable.

But Erik Orsenna is a novelist of the first rank and Love and Empire is France's A Passage to India - except that it is far wittier and a good deal more saucy.

And as a comparative testament of French colonialism, there is a gulf between Love and Empire and Indochine - though the latter no doubt had punters queuing for tickets from Clermont Ferrand to Dieppe, wallowing in the glory of the imperial years, before Dien Bien Phu put a smart stop to the revelry.

Orsenna's prose embraces both intellectual dexterity and frank farce.

It is unsparing in its burlesque mockery of French colonial pretensions and of the distortions such pretensions perpetrated on the French psyche, yet it reads with wit and verve.

His tone is not sarcastic laughter but a mannered guffaw, head shaking in cultured disbelief and it is by this means that Love and Empire is deftly neither a fashionable mea culpa for France's imperial past nor a nationalist apology, holding with bravadoa median ground between the two camps.