The story of the Reverend Jim Jones and his Jonestown commune in the Guyanan jungle is etched in collective memory. Before 9/11, the suicide/murder in 1978 of more than 900 members of his cult was the largest single loss of civilian life by a deliberate act in US history. Having spent his childhood in Guyana, Fred D’Aguiar has a personal context within which to situate this imaginative reconstruction of the commune, and every aspect of the setting is beautifully realised. Our knowledge of the sequence of events cannot be set aside, so reading the book becomes a rather combative experience if one takes issue with any decisions made by D’Aguiar as he creates fiction from what was once news. The basic narrative choices he has made – to use the present tense, and to use a great deal of reported speech – have the effect of throwing a thin veil over the book, distancing the reader somewhat. Perhaps such mechanisms are necessary here, to protect us from the true horror recounted. The short lives and cruel deaths of the commune’s children are particularly poignant.
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