Book review: Children of Paradise, by Fred D'Aguiar

by Fred D'Aguiar
HarperCollins
4 stars
Amy Driscoll

Through the eyes of a young girl and her mother plotting to escape, the story of the Jonestown massacre of 1978 takes on new dimensions in a surprising novel that contrasts a dreamlike style with the terrifying paranoia of the Guyana jungle compound where 909 Americans died in a murder-suicide pact.

Fred D'Aguiar, a novelist, playwright and poet raised in Guyana until he was 12, reimagines the tragedy that stunned the world. The result is a slow ratcheting up of dread leavened by enough hope to keep us riveted to the end.

D'Aguiar drives the story with unspoken tension. The children chant and laugh, unfettered by prejudice and racism - but they're held in a compound from which they can't escape. Parents, drugged into oblivion if they resist, are kept separate from the children under the commune rule that all adults are parents to all children.

Guards remain blindly obedient, partly from fear, partly from hope of salvation. And at the centre of it all, the cult leader they call Father, who indulges his maniacal whims, inflicting vicious punishment at the slightest flicker of doubt that he is carrying out God's will.

It's a socialist paradise from outside and a slave camp inside, and into that dreadful space D'Aguiar introduces a fictional girl and her mother. Thirty-three people escaped from the commune on the day of the mass suicide, some by walking through the jungle, others surviving an airport ambush of an investigative mission led by US politician Leo Ryan, who was killed along with an NBC correspondent, a cameraman, a newspaper photographer and a family member.