Under a haze of bauxite dust and resentment spurred by foreign exploitation, a Caribbean island nation is revealed to be a ticking time bomb, only we never quite know when it will explode. If ever.
Guerrillas pulsates with menace if not a lot of action. Instead, there is much talking and cigarette smoking. Finely written if mostly inert, Guerrillas is less a story than a portrait of attitudinal ennui.
Did I like it? Yes, V. S. Naipaul was a brilliant writer, who here cements his reputation as a keen-eyed hybrid of Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Conrad. Even more than them, though, it’s hard to care about his people.
Peter Roche is a former political prisoner now working for a corporation trying to shed its exploitative image. Specifically, Sablich’s provides minor material aid to a farming project it helps promote run by Jimmy Ahmed, a biracial lost soul who poses as an activist. Jimmy goes along with his role, all the while seething with the resentment of a kept man. Also with lust for Roche’s sexually adventurous girlfriend, Jane, a jaded, underdressed product of a bourgeois mindset.
Jane emerges as a nexus of contempt, ridicule, and rare human sympathy in a book otherwise devoid of that last quality:
She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unassailability.
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| Chaguanas, a growing city in Trinidad, showcases the type of emerging development and advertisements amid swampy lushness the characters of Guerrillas see around them. Chaguanas is also the birthplace of author V. S. Naipaul. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaguanas. |
What drives Jane, it seems, is the need to prove herself by latching on to different types of men to overcome her own lack of direction. Whether this suggests authorial misogyny or a kind of social comment on the parasitic quality of Westerners on former colonial territories is hard to say; Naipaul’s narrative feeds both viewpoints.
Guerrillas has a lot in common with A Bend In The River, the Naipaul novel which follows this. Both feature an unnamed country with an unhappy colonial past. Both focus on a small number of querulous outsiders trying not to be swept up by regime change. Both revel in a kind of abject hopelessness in the face of slow-motion tragedy.
A Bend In The River is the better book, though I was more invested in Guerrillas. The people here feel more real and their relationships are presented more dynamically. There is a vivid reality in the setting, too; Naipaul seemed to base it on his Trinidadian homeland, describing it in a way you can taste and smell, if not exactly enjoy:
The sea smelled of swamp; it barely rippled, had glitter rather than color; and the heat seemed trapped below the pink haze of bauxite dust from the bauxite loading station. After the market, where refrigerated trailers were unloading; after the rubbish dump burning in the remnant of mangrove swamp, with black carrion corbeaux squatting hunched on fence posts or hopping about on the ground… after the naked children playing in the red dust of the straight new avenues, the clothing hanging like rags from backyard lines; after this, the land cleared a little.
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| Author V. S. Naipaul. Of Indian ancestry, his fiction often dealt with the unsettled racial differences between peoples. The main white male protagonist, Peter Roche, may have been imprisoned for anti-apartheid activism, yet Jimmy still ironically calls him "Massa" every chance he gets. Image from https://delistraty.com/2018/08/15/v-s-naipaul-and-the-impossibility-of-going-home/ |
The problem with Guerrillas comes near the end, when you realize the book about people going nowhere is literally going nowhere.
A criticism leveled by many at Naipaul, in the years before his death and up to the present, is that he was an apologist for Western exploitation of other cultures. It’s hard to read this from Guerrillas, where a colonial past as well as continued American domination of the bauxite industry keeps the country in an oppressive shadow.
“You know what they say,” Jimmy tells Jane. “You may not be able to make a living in England, but England teaches you how to live.”
Naipaul also annoyed many of his critics by suggesting a lack of a constructive alternative to zero-sum capitalism, a point Guerrillas advances. Jimmy’s agricultural experiment, for one thing, is an obvious failure despite the socialistic rhetoric pasted to its walls. He lacks any vision except his resentment for England, from where he was deported under disgrace. All he can do now is promote himself as a shining example for youth, all the while losing followers.
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| While agriculture is successfully practiced across the Caribbean, it requires much to manage properly, including planting buffer crops like the cabbage above to protect the soil. In Guerrillas, Roche is struck by the lack of constructive effort by Jimmy and his team. Image from https://sta.uwi.edu/uwitoday/archive/november_2012/article38.asp |
Jimmy contents himself writing fantasies about Jane coming to his house for sex and enlightenment and by having his way with one dreadlocked boy too frightened of the world to go anywhere else. Jimmy’s a nasty, tragic figure, dangerous to himself and others, as much of an outsider as anyone we meet since he is half-Chinese.
Jimmy is supposedly based on Michael X, a Trinidadian revolutionary of the early 1970s Naipaul wrote about directly in his prior book, the essay collection The Killings In Trinidad. Michael X caught the eye of fashionable Western leftists for a time, in connection with his arrest for murder. In his essay, Naipaul notes how Michael was touted by international celebrities like John Lennon for a while before they found other causes.
In Guerrillas Jimmy remembers being called a “playboy” back in London. Jane realizes the term he heard was “plaything;” in England as well as at home people in power see Jimmy as someone to patronize without taking seriously. Away in his junk-littered abode, writing for himself about his imagined conquests, he comes across early on as less a figure of menace than a frustrated writer, maybe even a stand-in for Naipaul:
Words, which at some times did so much for him, now did not restore him to himself. He was a lost man, more lost than he had been as a boy, in his father’s shop, at school, in the streets of the city, when he saw only what he saw and knew nothing.
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| Born Michael de Freitas, Michael X became a symbol of empowerment and violence in the early 1970s. Like Jimmy, Michael X was also writing an autobiographical novel he never finished. He was executed for murder in 1975, the same year Guerrillas was published. Image from https://news.sky.com/story/michael-x-the-multiple-lives-of-the-man-once-dubbed-the-uks-answer-to-malcolm-x-12984363 |
Knowing a little of Naipaul helped me appreciate Guerrillas more, as its unnamed country might just as well be his native Trinidad. Jimmy, Jane, and Roche all seem like self-portraits of different aspects of Naipaul, as a struggling writer, a globe-trotting dilettante, and a serious thinker not able to accomplish as much as he’d like.
Is this enough to engage someone reading Naipaul for the first time? I doubt it.
For the most part, nothing happens in Guerrillas, at least not for most of the novel. We have a sense of impending disaster, but in a state of suspended animation. At the beginning of the book, there is some mystery involving a teenager named Stephens, a member of Jimmy’s agricultural experiment who has disappeared, reportedly to join a gang. Eventually he is discovered, anticlimactically offscreen, his fate an ambiguous warning of what lies ahead for Jimmy.
Much later in the book, Roche faces his own challenge when a local leader interviews him about what he, a foreigner, makes of this country. Roche senses he is being led into a trap, but is unable to dodge the questions, later blaming his “vanity.”
It is a very tense section of the book, with a lot of subliminally aggressive moments and minute attention to such things as microphone tests and air conditioning. Also, a ripping philosophical discussion on the elusive nature of political progress. Naipaul ably channeling his own experiences both as a media figure and social outsider.
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| On the radio program "Encounter," Roche has a tense interview about Caribbean affairs. As a young man, Naipaul worked on a similar type of program aired by the BBC, "Caribbean Voices." Above, Pauline Henriques and Samuel Selvon co-host a "Voices" show in 1952, two years before Naipaul joined their staff. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean_Voices |
Roche is asked what he had hoped to accomplish, and is pressed if he is “disappointed” by the results, with a few barbs thrown in:
“But what a nice world you inhabit, Peter. You have so much room for error. I wouldn’t be welcome among white people, however much I wanted to work among them.”
Roche comes home realizing he made a tremendous mistake. But we never learn what came of the interview, or what kind of reaction it drew. It instead becomes another of the book’s anticlimaxes.
The other standout section of narrative for me is when Roche, Jane, and an older European friend named Harry watch the surrounding countryside begin to glow with the effects of rioting. His wife and servant gone, Harry packs a gun. “My father never employed anybody he couldn’t beat with his own two hands,” he tells Jane and Roche.
This part is also tensely rendered with the same attention to detail. And while not exactly a false alarm, it doesn’t lead to much of anything.
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| From their privileged enclave on a hill, Jane, Roche, and Harry watch the city below them burn with rioting that threatens to spill over to their homes. "For all of them the world was fragile," Naipaul writes. "And there had been a calamity." Image from https://www.videvo.net/video/smoke-and-fire-on-a-scenic-view-of-san-fernando-hill-trinidad-and-tobago-in-the-caribbean-using-dji-mavic-air/1365376/ |
Ultimately the book resolves with a tragic, violent, totally predictable ending. The only mystery is the characters’s motivations for behaving the way that they do. As I say, it’s tough to really care as they aren’t likable enough. They act and feel too much like fictional constructs, fated to behave a certain way because of who they are.
Yet Guerrillas captures an immersive sense of impending apocalyptical dread that feels very representative of its time and place and easy to relate to today. Civilization becomes a thin veneer, ready to fall away:
The brown hills held guerillas; so the newspapers and the government said. The stripped hill at the back of the house, the back garden, sloped down to woodland and a gully; and in that hill hidden gully there was a regular traffic of people on foot, wild people, disordered and unkempt, who chattered as they passed, briskly, in groups, morning and evening, going to and coming from she knew not where.
Naipaul does atmosphere very well throughout this book. What is lacking is more the fullness of its characters and especially story; when he tries to converge the political and the personal in the big climax, the result is rushed and unconvincing. But there are some choice moments along the way; the journey is enough not to strain after its message.
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