[In the following review of Dear Future, King faults the novel's complexity, lack of narrative development, and weak conclusion.]

I have followed Fred D'Aguiar's work with interest ever since I read Mama Dot, his first volume of poetry, and attended the Royal Court production of A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death. The success of The Longest Memory, a novel in which the prose has the sensitivity of verse, confirmed D'Aguiar's ability to treat black history with complexity. Each work contributed to a new canon of literature written by West Indians born or long resident in England. Dear Future, however, may be his first book without such a future. The curse of magic realism has infected a highly poetical yet realistic writer; the new novel is difficult to get into, the technical complexity is greater than the story, its narrative movement fragments rather than builds, and the conclusion is thin and sentimental.

The novel shows how politics and exile can destroy family; themes include the role of the West Indian woman as family head, the fragmentation of family as a result of the West Indian diaspora, and the creation of the “black” Briton from a variety of nationalities, religions, skin shades, and cultures. As in the novels of Wilson Harris, who appears the model for D'Aguiar's version of magic realism, history is retold in new forms and fantastic stories to permit renewal and avoid the burden of the past. The corruption, racial divisions, and violence that characterized Guyanese politics are neutralized by fantasy, humor, and grotesque caricatures. But this remains a story of people damaged by history, hope, poverty, and politics. The mother in the story is herself a true believer of the nationalist leader; to survive, she becomes corrupt and a victim of his tyranny. Her husband, a diamond prospector, hides in England with the money of others. Raymond, a dentist for whom she worked in Guyana, fears for his life after having placed a transistor pickup in the filling of the dictator's teeth. The mother earlier left Raymond to become a government agent, as he had no future. Her current man in London is a Moslem who tricks her Hindu-Indian Portuguese children into being circumcised by a Jewish rabbi, a trick to which she consents as she hopes to marry, until she learns that the Pakistani is already married and wants her as a second wife. She does not even love him but needs the sex and companionship.

The Longest Memory concerned a father's brutal treatment of his son supposedly to help him survive as a slave but also to hide the father's sins. The new novel also reveals the guilt of parents, especially fathers, and the struggle to survive in a harsh world. In British Guyana different groups of the world's populations were brought together to develop a colony, then were left with one another at independence. The resulting violence was made worse by American and British interference and by ideologies. In Dear Future D'Aguiar gives imaginative form to how this history separated children from parents, how some offspring became British while others died in Guyana, and what being a British West Indian or a black Briton means beyond the simplicities of race relationships. The themes and prose are good, but not the story line or its treatment; this novel is more likely to be discussed than read with pleasure.