Thrushcross Grange
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 built-up hillsides; after the new housing estates, rows of unpainted boxes of concrete and corrugated iron already returning to the shantytowns that had been knocked down for this development; after the naked children playing in the red dust of the straight new avenues, the clothes hanging like rags from back yard lines; after this, the land cleared a little. And it was possible to see over what the city had spread: on one side, the swamp, drying out to a great plain; on the other side, a chain of hills, rising directly from the plain.1
On an unnamed Caribbean island in the years after independence, two white foreigners, Roche and Jane, are on their way from the Ridge, the fortified hilltop neighborhood where expatriates and the local elite live in a state of perpetual anxiety, to a commune in the countryside run by a man named Jimmy Ahmed.
Roche was a dissident in South Africa who was captured and tortured by the apartheid regime. Later, he wrote a book and came to London, where he met Jane, a young Englishwoman working for a publishing company. They came to the island together some months ago, and Roche, who had obtained a job at a firm formerly involved with the slave trade, forged an uneasy partnership with Jimmy, arranging for boys from the slums to come work the land.
Jimmy's surname is adopted; he was in fact born ‘Jimmy Leung’, the son of a Chinese grocer and a native woman. He went to England as a young man and was recognized as a rising black leader, before being implicated in the rape of a white woman and returning to the island. Here, his biraciality makes him a double outsider.
The name of the commune, Thrushcross Grange, recalls Wuthering Heights and the swarthy outcast Heathcliff: "Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China."2 The reference is at odds both with the tropical setting and the black nationalist slogans that adorn the road to the commune, but the absurdity of the juxtaposition passes without comment.
Jimmy's self-published pamphlet proclaims, "All revolutions begin with the land,"3 but Roche and Jane find that the attempts at agriculture have been a failure and the commune is in a state of dilapidation.
Roche has come to ask after a boy, Stephens, whom he had sent to the compound. The boy is gone, and Jimmy is non-committal. Roche and Jane leave.
A state of decay
She knew now, after four months, what she had known on that first day: that she had come to a place at the end of the world, to a place that had exhausted its possibilities.4
Some time later, Jimmy invites Jane out, first to a downtown hotel bar, and then to his house, alone, and they become intimate. Jane and Roche have already grown bored of each other, and, it is hinted that Roche suffers from some sort of sexual deficiency in connection with his torture in South Africa.
Jimmy, like Roche before him, detects her superficiality, in how she flaunts her Moroccan necklaces and a French lighter, of which she is fond of remarking, as if offhand, "Sahara gas, I suppose." She in turn perhaps recognizes Jimmy's weakness, his appetite for recognition, his obsession with the regard of white women.
Elsewhere, we are introduced to some of the other residents of the Ridge. Harry de Tunja, in the midst of a split with his wife, finds that sympathy for him has evaporated after the revelation that he sought immigrant status in Canada, prefiguring the fear that came to dominate life there. Meredith Herbert is a local radio broadcaster and former government minister who quit politics while managing not to lose respectability – an unusual circumstance in a place where "political failure was a kind of extinction."5
Meredith appears thoroughly domesticated – in middle age, out of politics, with a wife and young daughter – but Roche senses the "unappeased ambition"6 underneath the surface. Jane decides he is "suburban" and dislikes him immediately.
'Guerrilla Slain in Dawn Shoot-out'
I'm the only man that stands between them and revolution, and they know it now, massa. That's why I'm the only man they're afraid of. They know that all I want in my hand is a megaphone, and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down. I'm not like the others. I'm not a street-corner politician. I don't make any speeches. Nobody's going to throw me in jail because I'm subversive. I'm not subversive... I have no gun, I'm no guerrilla.7
Stephens, the boy that Roche sent to Jimmy's compound, is killed by the police in an early-morning ambush. The slaying sparks unrest in the slums. The foreigners shelter on the Ridge behind police checkpoints, terrified even of their servants, and watch the smoke rise from the city below.
The course of events come to us in fragments; wild rumors are relayed by telephone. Meredith is recalled as a minister and chased through the streets. The government is on the brink of collapse. The police have withdrawn from the city. The road to the airport has been cut off. We hear of Jimmy leading processions in the city, at the forefront of something called the 'Arrow of Peace'. Later, he has apparently fallen out of favor and a multitude of new leaders have risen up.
And then, the tide turns back as quickly as it came in. The violence is quelled and the government survives. A few stores were ransacked, and Jimmy’s stock fell while Meredith’s rose, but in the end, little of substance changed. Earlier, Jimmy wrote to a friend in England, "When everybody wants to fight there's nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla."8 Roche, in an unguarded moment after the riots, puts it differently: "I didn't believe in the guerrillas... I believed in the gangs."9
At last we find Roche preparing to depart from the island, leaving Jane and Jimmy to act out their climax of violence, and we recall the words that Meredith said to Roche: "You transgressed; you were punished; the world goes on."10
Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul. Originally published 1975. Quotations and page numbers from the 1980 Vintage Books edition.
pp. 1–2
p. 65
p. 10
p. 50
p. 150
p. 152
p. 23
p. 95
pp. 245–246
p. 243