Nadine Gordimer's writing career covered more than sixty years: this, the seventh of her many short-story collections, comes from about a third of the way through it.

Many of the stories seem to be in one way or another about the less obvious consequences of racism and colonialism in Africa. The title story looks through the eyes of a globetrotting foreign correspondent at the empty Westminster-style ritual of a post-independence parliament in a single-party state, where the Speaker's Clerk is dressed up as a "perfect papier-mâché blackamoor from an eighteenth century slave trader's drawing room" and the Foreign Minister solemnly delivers a content-free travelogue of a recent state visit. It's not worth two lines of copy, so the journalist moves on to another assignment. His editor sends him to retrace the steps of Livingstone's last journey for the upcoming centenary of his death, and he finds himself staying in a lakeside hotel (presumably in Zambia), where his readings from Livingstone's journals are ironically juxtaposed with his observation of the white people who run the hotel and their guests, trying to attach a veneer of seventies trendiness to their crumbling heritage of colonial luxury. Gordimer doesn't make the connections for us, we can take it as the strength of Africa defeating both the out-of-place idealist and the staying-on exploiter, or we can see it as an ironic commentary on the "Christian civilisation" Livingstone was so determined to bring to central Africa.

We go on to look at white South Africans out of place in Europe, in black Africa, and in their own country; at the troubled interactions between black intellectuals and white liberals; and we even get a few good old-fashioned parent-child, sibling, or husband-wife-lover stories. But all with that dry Gordimer twist. Of its time, but not really dated. ( )