It is like the obscene photograph. It may surprise the casual readers of Naipaul's work, those who regret the absence of calypso in his West Indian books. The island now is infertile, crowded, reeking with gas fumes and the dust from the bauxite plant. The condition Naipaul is describing here is as American as apple pie, and though Jane is English she epitomizes our own failure to understand just how empty and foolish someone like Patty Hearst is, and why it is always fatal to misread the intentions of adventurers and their victims. He is concerned with helping dispossessed blacks on this island find their feet, though in fact he is exercising a kind of control over them.
Most men are captive, and therefore brutal and small, but there are survivors.
It is amazing that in such a closely-plotted book there is room for this, but the people themselves are even more remarkable. This is a novel without a villain, and there is not a character for whom the reader does not at some point feel deep sympathy and keen understanding, no matter how villainous or futile he may seem. It is scarifying in the opposite way from a nightmare.