Burnt-Out Cases

By Paul Gray

GUERRILLAS by V.S. NAIPAUL 248 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Three burnt-out cases smolder on a Caribbean island. Roche, 45, is an altruistic white whose support of black causes once earned him torture in a South African jail. Now he is the house humanitarian for a local corporation, supervising a back-to-the-land project. Its design: to drain revolutionary energy away from foreign investments and native rulers. Jimmy Ahmed, a racial mix of yellow, black and white, runs this sham commune as a means of assembling responsive young boys; his heart is back in London, where trendy liberals once puffed him up from criminal to Third World celebrity. Roche's English mistress is a bored adventuress who likes to taunt men. This trio forms, as things turn out, a menage made in hell.

In his first novel in four years, V.S. Naipaul, 43, again proves himself the laureate of the West Indies. As he would admit, that distinction is not without irony. Naipaul once called this locale the "end of the world," and he should know. Born in Trinidad of Indian parents and educated in England, he is a native expatriate with a fine distaste for patriotic rhetoric. In The Loss of El Dorado he outlined the history of his birthplace as a danse macabreof oppressors and oppressed.

Guerrillas is thus conspicuously short of heroes. Far from ennobling him, his suffering in prison has left Roche passive and chastened. "You must understand," he tells Jane, "I have always accepted authority." Jane talks fashionably about the world going up in flames, not because she cares for the wretched of the earth but because she is a snob; she does not believe that life could be better, only that existence for people of her breeding is not as nice as it once was. In between lurid fantasies of sexual violence, Ahmed is petulantly worried that a revolution may go on without him at the helm: "When everybody wants to fight, there's nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla." The native politicians are corrupt, the foreign businessmen avaricious, and the people either lethargic or criminal. When an uprising does flare, it is nasty and inept.

Perhaps no one but Naipaul has the inside and outside knowledge to have turned such a dispirited tale into so gripping a book. His island is built entirely of vivid descriptions and offhand dialogue. At the end, it has assumed a political and economic history, a geography and a population of doomed, selfish souls. Partisans of all stripes will argue that Naipaul has maligned their ideologies: not all revolutionary leaders are pathological perverts, not all benevolent whites are deluded do-gooders. These cavils are as irrelevant as they are true. Guerrillas is not a polemic (polemicists will be annoyed) but a Conradian vision of fallibility and frailty. With economy and compassion, Naipaul draws the heart of darkness from a sun-struck land.

Paul Gray

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