V. S. Naipaul’s “Guerrillas”
Book review by Dennis D. McDonald
I read V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas with an increasing sense of both awe and unease. Awe because of the quality of the writing, and unease because the characters and the situation they inhabit are so real.
The story itself is deceptively simple: a small tropical island, formerly a British colony, is on the brink of revolution, with foreign economic exploitation and deteriorating weather adding to the pressure.
We follow a handful of disaffected people: Jimmy, a formerly idealistic leader whose poorly thought out agricultural and economic reforms are failing; Roche, an imported South African liberal recruited by local economic interests to promote reforms that are visibly failing; and Jane, a London-based marketer whose cynicism seems to infect everyone she meets.
Naipaul portrays their interactions with cutting, incisive skill. They aren’t merely stand-ins for the evils of colonialism. Their words and actions suggest they know they are caught up in the exploitation they claim to oppose. They can go home at night to comfortable houses and beds, yet they realize that the situation is unsustainable. A revolution eventually proves to be only a tremor, but from the inside it bodes ill for everyone in the long term.
For most of the novel, Naipaul maintains an uneasy calm as storm clouds gather. When the storm breaks, the main characters see how little power and influence they have. Police leave their posts, utilities become intermittent, food becomes scarce, and smoke rises from fires across the crowded city. Calm seems to then return but we see in the closing pages that this is an illusion.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel that interweaves its main characters’ psychological states so skillfully with social and economic turmoil. Having grown up in Trinidad, Naipaul describes a fictional society where cultures clash in ways that may be invisible to casual visitors and tourists. Racism, poverty, religious fundamentalism, privilege, class warfare, and self-doubt all feed a pervasive sadness in a society where violence and tragedy seem inevitable. We glimpse some of these themes in George Orwell’s early novel Burmese Days, but Naipaul’s scalpel is much sharper.
Review copyright © 2026 by Dennis D. McDonald
