Book description
Set on a troubled Caribbean island - where Asians, Africans, Americans
and former British colonials co-exist in a state of suppressed hysteria
- Guerrillas is a novel of colonialism and revolution. A white man
arrives with his mistress, an Englishwoman influenced by fantasies of
native power and sexuality, unaware of the consequences of her actions.
Together with a leader of the "revolution", they act out a
gripping drama of death, sexual violence, and spiritual impotence.
Guerrillas depicts a convulsion in public life, and ends in private
violence. Place and people are evoked with an intensity unrivalled
elsewhere. The novel comes with extraordinary force from the centre of a
profound moral awareness of the world's plight. 'Impeccable prose,
precise, austere, modulating always from place to people to dialogue
with a fastidious reserve. Guerrillas seems to me Naipaul's Heart of
Darkness: a brilliant artist's anatomy of emptiness, and of despair'
Observer
