Customer Reviews

Guerrillas

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having just finished reading GUERRILLAS, I surfed over to read what others thought. The other reviews left me somewhat staggered and altogether bewildered. GUERRILLAS is set on a benighted and misbegotten Caribbean island in modern (that is to say, postcolonial) times. The novel is not set in Africa. Pointedly, the book's power derives in part from its portrayal of Caribbean rhythms, the oppressive and ominous atmosphere of the coconut plantation, the tribal background beat of "the reggae" (Naipaul's phrase). The second great strength of this novel is its depiction of human frailites, transgressions, and moral breakdowns. An expatriate English couple and a West-Indian would-be revolutionary are the three main characters, and the agonizing (and mostly self-destructive) sexual and philosophic choices they are faced with ring true to life. The compromises and rationalizations they make to themselves and each other result in their irrevocable mental and moral deterioration. The fragility of the social setting in which Jane, Roche, and Jimmy find themselves leads to infidelity, sexual abuse, murder, and what can be just as horrifying as any of these, the voluntary surrender of one's soul. Finally, the novel's powerful, profound ending arrestingly reveals the enigmatic and conflicted essence of postcolonial consciousness. GUERRILLAS is a minor masterpiece.

Analyses of V.S. Naipaul's Guerillas

V.S. Naipaul's novel, Guerillas tells the story of Peter Roche, a South African resistance fighter, his mistress Jane, and a revolutionary leader Jimmy Ahmed. The book unfolds on a former British colony in the Caribbean during the 1970`s. This Island is inhabited with Asians, Africans, Americans and former British colonials. Racial and economic tensions are ever present and the islanders are said to "coexist in hysteria." Peter Roche has made his way to the island to "work," while his mistress, Jane, has come along to join Peter for her own reasons. From Jane's point of view, initially, Peter was a doer and had a cause. He was saint-like and gentle. However as the novel progressed, she began to see Peter in a different light. Furthermore, from his own perspective, Peter was a failure, and inadequate in the eyes of Jane, who he grew to seek approval from. It was Jane's ultimate rejection of Peter via her sexual indecencies that enabled Peter, in an attempt to salvage his pride, to overlook the forced sodemy and murder of his wife by Jimmy Ahmed.

Peter Roche was a South African freedom fighter. Though he was white, he readily fought for the black man and even risked his life for apartheid. He authored a book about his experiences in South Africa. He was tortured by the South African government and was asked to recount his memoirs in a book. It was under these pretences that he had met his mistress Jane. She was in the publishing business and used his book as an excuse to get to know him. Jane was portrayed as a character that lived through her men. She seemed incomplete without a man. Further, it seemed as if she was searching for a rich, powerful, handsome man that could finance her life and make her a complete person. When the novel began, she had found this in Peter. According to Jane, he was intelligent, well known in London, and was a "doer." Jane saw Peter as an individual with a cause and therefore looked up to him. She even said that she found him "handsome." Her life before Peter was a colorful one, filled with different lovers, and even a marriage. This shows her reliance on men and her feelings of incompleteness without a significant other.
Naipaul doesn't fully disclose Peter Roche's experiences in South Africa. Further, the novel doesn't comment on his political ideologies, or what affects the torture had on Peter physically or psychologically. It can be assumed that the South Africans' broke him down. However, he willingly put himself in a position that he knew would warrant severe penalty if caught. Even though he was freed by the government and able to live a hassle-free life in London, he chose not to do so. This shows that Peter was searching for something to do with his life. He came to the Caribbean island to be a hero. He wanted to set in motion some sort of change that could help the people of the island. He wanted to be looked up to and respected. However, as time passed on in the island, he felt more and more isolated. He began to realize that his presence on the island was a source of tension and controversy. People on the island had not read his book, and the little fame that he had had in London was nonexistent on the island. Further, he worked for a company, Siblich that used to be heavily involved in the slave trade on that exact island. It was generally thought among the people that in hiring Peter, the firm was attempting a public relations ploy. Peter therefore became disillusioned with his role on the island. He wished that, "His life had taken another turn." (204) He no longer knew why he was there and what he was to do with his life.

Peter's failure at making a difference on the island drove him to look for comfort in Jane. She however, had become withdrawn from him and no longer cared what he did. She "detached herself from his failure and his job." (97) She spent most of the hot days drunk off of "rum punch" or having an affair with a sexually perverse man named Jimmy "Leung" Ahmed. Jimmy was a mulatto (half Chinese half black) who married mysterious English women and lived in London near Wimbledon. Since then, he had moved to this island and become the leader of the "Revolution for land," which was the major opposition group to the present government. He lived and led his operations out of a commune called Thrushcross Grange that had many black boys living on it. Peter's company, Sablich, was apparently giving aid to Jimmy's movement. Jimmy, however, fantasized most of the day in his writings about his life; who he was and who he would be. He fantasizes about his shortcomings and his race and his inadequacies. He also thought of Jane and invited her over to his house. He "had intercourse with her," even though it seemed that he also enjoyed having sex with Bryant, one of the boys on the commune. It wasn't clear until the end, but Jimmy and his boys were the "Guerrillas," and were part of the resistance movement. However, the American inhabitants of the island refused to let the resistance take hold of the government. That would jeopardize their bauxite mining and would be economically disadvantageous. So, the guerrillas' attempts at rioting were futile and the army quickly contained them
. After Jane's relationship with Peter began to brake down and tensions on the island became great, she decided to leave and move back to London. Jane, "had come to the end of a cycle...and [was going] to get started on another" relationship. She went to say goodbye to Jimmy. He then precedes to sodemize her and brings her to Bryant who "cuts her up" and kills her.
Later that day, Roche comes to see Jimmy and sees Jane's "sahara" lighter. He immediately smells foul play and realizes that Jimmy, or the boys have murdered Jane. He runs away and goes back to his home on the Ridge. He finds her passport and her ticket and rips up the ticket. He is willing to overlook the murder because if he acknowledges it, he will be brought to shame. In order to keep his sanity, he must get rid of Jane. Her rejection of him is too much for him to handle. His feelings of failure coupled with his rejection by the people of the island were a slap in the face to Peter. Having to come to terms with Jane cheating on him, looking down on him, and leaving him would have been to hard for him to cope. So, in a way, he welcomed Jane's murder, as it allowed him to continue living.

Even though it's barely 250 pages, it took me months to finish Guerrillas. The novel's island is a place of poverty and decay, and Naipaul uses long and labored descriptions to make us actually feel the stagnant despair. Unfortunately, the descriptions don't so much paint a picture in our mind's eye as simply exasperate our patience.

What's more, for the first two-hundred pages almost nothing happens. Our characters find themselves on the sidelines, powerless, and perhaps unwilling to do anything for the impovrished people whose suffering seemed to draw them across the Atlantic to begin with.

Style further follows substance because the novel, like its characters, seldom attempts to understand the suffering of the island's racially oppressed people. We have no account of the problems of their current government or the specifics of their colonial history. Their suffering is treated only as part of the landscape as seen through the eyes of an outsider or tourist. Our protagonists claim to be on the island to affect positive change, but it's their underlying self-interest that concerns Naipaul most and serves as the novel's primary conceit. Slowly, he uncovers the seemingly bottomless vanity and vulnerability of his characters. Eventually he strips sympathy from sufferering and righteousness from social activism (while dabbling in more-than-a-little misogyny).

It's outlook isn't sunny, but the novel is both memorable and effective. I can see how others would disagree, and I can't recommend it to the casual reader unless he's particularly interested in the tension between liberalism and self-interest.

An overall sense of doom and nihilism permeates the novel, and Naipaul's laconic and repetitive style is just as effective in describing the drought-plauged landscape of the island nation as it is in exploring the dysfunctional relationships between the characters.

Naipaul's characters have a tendency to digress into purely political exchanges that sometimes (at least to the North American reader) seem to come at the expense of character development. But this style of writing is by no means accidental. The novel is set on an impoverished Caribbean island where, in Naipaul's words, "politics...was often a man's only livelihood".

The relationship between the outsiders (visiting foreigners) and the insiders (the native population) defines the novel.

Meredith Hebert, a peripheral cabinet minister for the moribund ruling party, is juxtaposed against Peter Roche, an exiled anti-apartheid subversive from South Africa. Meredith struggles to understand Roche's apparent political apathy and indifference, even regarding his own torture at the hands of the South African regime. Roche's mistress, Jane, carelessly dabbles in the life and affairs of Jimmy Ahmed, the narcissistic and irresponsible leader of a failed commune and a reluctant and ineffective revolutionary.

And Harry de Tunja, the wealthy local, just wants to get off of the island and is consequently branded a pariah in his own community.

I was not familiar with the historical events that inspired Naipaul to write the novel, so I didn't know how things were ultimately going to turn out. Perhaps it was partly for this reason that I found the ending particularly gripping and well written. The final chapter is a convincing description of the subtle lunacy that ultimately characterizes all human tragedies.

This book is not an easy read, but at the same time it is not an overly complicated work. Overall, I found it to be a great introduction to Naipaul's writings and I would highly recommend it for anyone that is lucky enough to have a week at the cottage.

I was keen to check out V S Naipaul. His declared masterpiece, "A House for Mr Biswas", seemed the natural place to start but its length put me off. So I decided on "Guerrillas", which according to David Rubel's "The Reading List : Contemporary Fiction", was widely praised and did much to expand Naipaul's readership in the United States. It had as its theme a subject which intrigued me - an exploration of the white man's (outsider's) liberal view of third world politics and why it is ultimately ineffectual and impotent - the setting is in Africa but it could well be in any developing country. Naipaul's prose mirrors the physical and political landscape against which the action takes place - bleak and depressing. What keeps you going is a fascination with its three central characters (Roche, Jane and Jimmy) and a dark sense of foreboding that culminates in the gruesome outcome. They are all unsympathetic characters - self-serving and cruel. Jane is especially loathsome which, without giving the ending away, lends a sort of poetic justice to the conclusion of the whole affair - but where Naipaul ultimately fails is in the less than convincingly drawn portrait of Jimmy (arguably the novel's pivotal character) and hence in not preparing us sufficiently for the display of violence and cruelty he manifested. I found gaps in my understanding of Jimmy. I would like to revisit the novel some time. With a little help from a fellow reader perhaps, I will someday get to the bottom of this tale of hopelessness and despair.

This is a horrible story, one of many that Naipaul has written. However, he usually covers political or social violence, with its chilling though unpredictable inevitability, as a portrait of a local culture. In Guerillas, he follows the descent of a single sick individual, who covers his insanity with revolutionary rhetoric from another society, that of American blacks of the 1960s. Though the rhetoric doesn't apply in Trinidad, the underdeveloped society lacks the structures to question it and he is allowed to continue his "activism."

Reading this is depresssing and hard. THere is none of Naipaul's characteristic humor in it, which provides such relief in his other novels, and there is not a single sympathetic character in it. Instead, we are treated to a gallery of losers and lost people, who come together in confusion and who are too stupid to have much fear.

THere are many notable moments in it, however. THere is a deformed boy, for instance, who when he has money resolves to immediately spend on a movie, For Love of Ivey; as the movie ends - it is a romance in the US that portrays opportunities that Trinidad lacks - the boy feels despair as he hears people sobbing in the audience at their lack of possibility. This is classic Naipaul, and demonstrates once again the greatness of his talent. But it is so bleak.

Pair this sometimes graphic novel with Dostovesky's Demons (The Possessed, The Devils) -- dramatic exposures of the association of privileged but sick-souled fellow travelers with revolutionaries. As with the Dostoevsky novel, although there are flashbacks the main narrative recounts just a few days, with much conversation and some near-monologues of the principal characters, lies, rumors about the past of the revolutionary leader's behavior abroad, movement of characters here and there between just a few main locales, arson fires breaking out in the city, and murders. Strengths of Guerrillas include the sensory precision of its drought-stricken island setting, and the rendering of anxiety, fear, manipulation, resentment, and vanity throughout the book.

Those who have read Naipaul's relatively more famous 'A Bend in the River', should remember that when Indar the professor took his childhood friend Salim to a party at historian Raymond's house Joan Baize's excellent songs on injustice and 'end of the world'(from nuclear threat) were being played. Salim knew for sure that those were make believe. He felt that only those who got justice most of the times and are expecting to get it as before could sing such sweet songs on injustice. Those who knew that the world would go on and they were safe in it were likely to sing such songs on the end of the world. Naipaul never believed in a hasty, romantic and adventurous way of improvemrnt that has been the vision of revolution among the guerrillas. His mantra has been continuous self-assessment. That is why Peter and not Jimmy Ahmed, is the hero in a novel with such an explosive title. Jimmy's diary that he writes time to time in the form of a letter clearly betrays his self- congratulatory narcissism only which, sadly enough, sustains him as a guerrilla. Then Meredith plays the game at the lawn of De Tunja. He asks De Tunja to describe an ideal day for himself but through a piece of paper written beforehand, shows Peter's adventure loving wife that men can not really think of much change at a time, as Tunja describes more or less an usual day. The woman is enraged. The story ends in total breakdown of faith and credibility among the revolutionaries. Naipaul's strength is in the balance of treatment that neither makes villains out of the revolutionaries nor does it ridicule them. This is a kind of novel which is not for the reader with passing interest in politics.

In the unnamed island where "Guerrillas" is set, native people barely up from savagery choke under a miasma of rotting jungle vegetation and pink bauxite dust from the U.S.-owned factories that bleed their country dry. When a couple of white do-gooders arrive to slake their liberal consciences, they are greeted with suspicion and hostility.

V.S. Naipaul's 1975 novel smolders with a kind of bleak and hazy resentment, at once tactile and enervating. Political correctness is out the window early, but not in a fun way. There's nothing fun about "Guerrillas", and for a long time, not much engaging, either. For over 100 pages, long conversations about bleak conditions alternate with streams of conscience regarding same.

"He wakened from his dream to the emptiness about him, to that interior he had so carefully prepared, for an audience that didn't exist." That's Jimmy Ahmed, the bisexual, biracial revolutionary who trades in his cachet as a radical-chic cause célèbre for a few acres of dirt he talks of turning into a socialist commune. Jimmy sees in the young British woman Jane an echo of the jaded Wimbledonite who used Jimmy as her plaything for a few weeks. His blood is stirred.

Jane, meanwhile, is bored with the whole scene, and especially her companion, Peter Roche, a white South African and retired revolutionary referred to by all, perhaps ironically, by his last name. "His intellectualism was a sham, a misuse of the mind, a series of expedients," Jane decides, carrying on a relationship with Jimmy more from spite than love.

As Suetonius in 2002 and other reviewers here note, there's not one likeable character in "Guerrillas", which along with the lack of much in the way of revolutionary activity (there's a good deal of civil unrest, all offscreen) makes for a plodding, disappointing read. If you aren't familiar with Naipaul going in, there isn't much in "Guerrillas" to keep you, not until the wheels of the story finally begin to turn and the focus of the book stops being so relentlessly internal.

As someone who's liked the bits of Naipaul I've read, I was struck by the treatment of Jimmy. He's supposedly based on Michael X, the revolutionary Naipaul took on directly in "The Killings In Trinidad", yet Jimmy for all his misplaced values and barely hidden rage is less dislikeable. Away in his junk-littered abode, writing for himself about his imagined conquests, he comes across as less a figure of menace than a failed Prospero, and maybe even a stand-in for Naipaul.

That last connection gets creepy when Jimmy and Jane come together for some of the worst sex scenes ever published. Naipaul doesn't write sex well, and what he does manage to describe is, well, pretty nauseating. Nausea is a recurring theme in "Guerillas", but it really clicks in when the action shifts to Jimmy's candlewick bedspread.

Jane is a failed character in my view, unconvincing in her affected remove and hauteur, a female that only buttresses Naipaul's misogynist label. Roche is only slightly more credible, just not that interesting. His big moment comes when he is interviewed for a radio program by a conniving government lackey, a scene which Naipaul presents with more visceral energy and attention to detail than he does to a murder.

About the best part of "Guerrillas" are Naipaul's unflinching descriptions of the land, which do go on after a while but are the most re-readable parts of this book; and a scene where Jane, Roche, and another white named Harry watch the rising smoke of riot from the comparative safety of their residential enclave, "The Ridge", realizing with growing certainty that they will not be safe for long. Ennui and dread are two emotions you don't associate with one another, but Naipaul mixes them effectively here.

But "Guerrillas" takes too long to start, and ends with a weak splat. I would cautiously recommend it only to the Naipaul enthusiast, but despite some effective bursts I neither enjoyed the book nor felt there was much of anything to be gleaned from reading it.

I came back to this novel after giving up on it after the first chapter a few years ago. I have read Naipaul's non-fiction account of the Michael X murders in Trinidad in his "The Killings in Trinidad." The book fictionalizes the story of murders committed at a black-power commune led by Michael X, a former pimp and accused rapist who returned to his native Trinidad in the early 1970's after living in England for many years.

The novel is very dark and grim with a sense of doom and gloom permeating the lives of all the characters. There is not one likable character. Naipaul takes pains to imply that the book is not set in Trinidad even though the actual events did occur there. This Trinidad is very different from the folksy Dickensian Trinidad of A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mystic Masseur. The Trinidad he describes in this book is a dreadful place ready to explode with civil war and racial violence. The wealthy and mostly white live in fear in exclusive enclaves in mortal fear of their own servants. The underclass blacks live in slums seething with barely suppressed violence.

The atmosphere of fear is well described but it unfortunately does not make this an enjoyable book. There were several stylistics touches that I found especially irritating. A very representative example is at the very end of the book. Jimmy Ahmed is the Michael X character. Near the end of the book there is a sex scene between Jimmy and Jane, the visiting British hipster. This sex scene becomes a rape scene. Just before Jimmy sodomizes Jane, ... he forcefully kisses her, forcing her mouth open and spitting into her mouth while repeatedly saying, "love, love." I can only interpret this as an inability on Naipaul's part to write sex scenes.

Scenes such as this leave the reader with a bad taste in his mouth. Avoid unless you feel you must read every word the great man has written.