Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

As he had been talking to Jane and Roche, as they had let him run on, he had begun to feel unsupported by his words, and then separate from his words; and he had a vision of darkness, of the world lost forever, and his own life ending on that bit of wasteland. After they had gone he allowed himself to sink into that darkness, keeping the memory of the afternoon close: the memory of Jane who, by her presence, manner, and talk, had suggested that darkness reserved for himself alone. Yet at the same time, in his fantasy, she washed away the darkness; he carried the picture of her standing outside the hut on the bare, bright earth, nervous, tremulous in her flared trousers.

Peter Roche is a South African, come to this unnamed island in the Caribbean to distance himself from political imprisonment and torture in his native country. Ostensibly, he has come to assist with various left-wing political projects, but the job he's taken is with a firm connected to global resource extractors. His girlfriend, Jane, is an American with little in the way of a political worldview; the Caribbean seems to be a kind of adventure for her, but one that has quickly soured, along with their relationship. Roche introduces Jane to Jimmy Ahmed, a local activist who has recently returned home (or been kicked out of) England, and who is trying to build an agricultural commune. Though Roche puts little stock in rumors, some say the commune is a front for guerrillas who threaten the island's political stability.

When Roche and Jane leave Jimmy's compound, he sits down and begins to write a letter: "Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing about the man they call Jimmy." One quickly realizes that what he's doing is writing as if he is Jane, describing himself in admiring and enigmatic terms. It's one of those brilliant touches that only Naipaul, who wrote about the inferiority complex of the post-colonial subject, could write. The island of Guerrillas, which is specifically not, but is inspired by, Naipaul's Trinidad, is a minor and disordered place. His long descriptions of the countryside focus on the accumulation of garbage, the desolation of wildfires. Even its revolutionaries are degenerate: Jimmy names his commune Thrushcross Grange, as if to borrow a little English respectability from Wuthering Heights, but he's sexually abusing the wayward young boys who come to work the land.

Guerrillas is a strangely oblique book. I don't know if I quite understood it. The instability, when it does come, happens off screen, while the white characters wait it out in their houses among the wealthier residents on the ridge outside of town. Though men like Jimmy and Roche should, by light of their fame, be important actors in these events, Naipaul makes it clear that they are mostly at the mercy of powerful figures never seen, some of the island, but also including the American bauxite extractors who arrive on the island carrying their stashes of explicit pornography. Guerrillas is a novel of waiting, of simmering tensions, until it finally does explode at the very end, in an act of sexual violence so grotesque and unpleasant (based on the real life murder conviction of Trinidadian activist Michael X) it's hard to think about the book as containing anything else.

When he wanted to, Naipaul could have a light touch; books like Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas cover similar themes with a lot of humor and irony. But Guerrillas is a dark, mean book, which makes you wonder what anyone could ever find funny about the state of the post-colonial world. It might be said that Guerrillas better reflects the violent dysfunctions of that world, but it's no mystery why it doesn't make anybody's best-of lists.