[In the following review, Amdahl offers a positive evaluation of Dear Future.]

Fred D'Aguiar begins his second novel, Dear Future (the first, The Longest Memory, won the Whitbread and the Higham awards in England), with the bright violence and not-quite singsong meter of a fairy tale: “Red Head got his name and visionary capacity at age nine when he ran behind an uncle chopping wood and caught the back of the axe on his forehead. His uncle, Beanstalk, feeling the reverberations of a soft wood as it yielded to the blade he'd swung back, looked over his shoulder and saw his favourite nephew half-run, half-walk in a wobbly line, do an about-turn, then flop to the ground in a heap.” The next sentences are distinctly in the tall-tale mode, detailing Beanstalk's ability to walk upon and lasso alligators before anyone else can so much as shout the word, making the first paragraph a promise that the book will be easily and pleasantly consumable—which, fortunately, turns out not to be the case.

Set in an unnamed Caribbean country whose “Cooperative Republic Village[s],” border dispute and ties to Great Britain suggest D'Aguiar's native Guyana, and peopled with characters whose nicknames are descriptive and/or meaningful and bestowed upon them by the community (Red Head, Beanstalk, Wheels, Bounce and the melodious but faintly malevolent Bash Man Goady, for instance), Dear Future is a novel that manages to be part of the relatively new but rigorous (and vigorous) tradition of the Caribbean novel, and yet wonderfully itself.

This is no mean feat. Stories, because there are so few of them, tend to be predictable, and categories, genres, even traditions, masking the tyranny of mediocrity as necessary discipline or enjoyable convention, enhance that predictability—mainly with an eye toward assuaging the consumer's pre-purchase doubts and hesitations. If the Caribbean novel is, as George Lamming (whose In the Castle of My Skin is considered one of the principal texts in a tradition he helped articulate) has it, a work “crowded with names and people” but “rarely concerned with the prolonged exploration of an individual consciousness,” a work in which it is “the collective human substance of the Village” that “commands our attention,” it is equally true that the door is thus thrown open to cardboard functionaries. If it is true that (Lamming again) in novels where “community, and not person, is the central character. … There is often no discernible plot, no coherent line of events with a clear, causal connection,” it is also true that the narrative freedom can slight a reader's need to feel that what has happened will affect what is to happen, that characters live in an economic, political and biological web peculiar to postcolonial culture. Finally, if the postcolonial novel is perforce concerned with the wretchedness of poor people, the means by which they endure and their restoration to humanity, its writers must beware the cartoon dialectic of good guys and bad guys: rich native religions versus a corrupt and empty Christianity; authentic creoles and pidgins versus artificial English; black versus white.

There are, in other words, a number of traps that D'Aguiar skirts perilously but manages to avoid. His success must be traced almost paragraph by paragraph: The struggle against predictability, against what in the end is simple facility and “ease of use” (in the belief that “ease” promotes not satisfaction but deterioration, of language, muscle, dignity—whatever), is here, in Dear Future, as subtle as it is sweet.

To pick up where we left off, at the close of paragraph one: After fairy tale and tall tale, D'Aguiar goes deeper and stranger.

Something made the uncle stare at the boy's forehead as if he were watching a miniature screen. The ruptured screen resembled a door blown off its hinges. Out stepped a white body of fluid in one boneless move. As if surprised by the sudden recognition that it was naked, the nubile body gathered about itself a flowing red gown which ran in ceaseless yards, covering all of the boy's face in seconds.

This is prose not, perhaps, as impenetrably and surreally lush as Wilson Harris's in The Palace of the Peacock, nor as richly poetic and thorough in its recovery of detail as Lamming's, but it does require its own kind of attention. As D'Aguiar slips soundlessly from fairy to tall to strange and tells the stories that compose “Dreams from the Republic of Nightmares”—Red Head's visions; the slow and grotesque progress of a main road being paved as it approaches Ariel, Red Head's village, which does not want it; a bicycle race and the preparation of Red Head for a draughts tournament; a wrestling match between a government-backed professional touring the country as part of an election campaign and one of the uncles; and the consequences of that astounding match—it's easy to be lulled by the easygoing fabulosity of it all. There is, however, a disturbing murmur to be heard, faintly but at all times, and just when you think you've got the hang of it, the bright violence erupts again, this time growing darker and darker by the sentence, as a mob of the President's men bears down, with torches and cutlasses, on the homes of the village. Chapter and section end; we move on to “Nightmares from the Republic of Dreams.”

This simple transposition is alarming in the quiet D'Aguiarian way: What can the difference possibly mean? The subject matter is certainly different: The four stories here deal mainly with the knavery of the President's factotums, but the tone is comic, as witness this description of “the heaviest person on the presidential payroll,” named Gamediser, at a whorehouse: “She would take his little dead meat, as he called it, into her mouth, switch to milking it with both hands heavily lubricated, sit on it and rodeo until she was out of breath and bored, tie him up and beat him until he got scared and wept and eventually released the tiny, unhemmed white flag that signalled his surrender.” Another episode shows the President's dentist gone over to the opposition, implanting a bug in a presidential cavity. But suddenly the fun and games are all over, as suddenly as the tall tales were, and the President's eccentricities have turned lethal. In the light of that particular muzzle flash, one begins to see how D'Aguiar moves back and forth in time, telling a story in one place and exposing it in another, concealing terror in pleasant melodies and slapstick.

“Homing” flips the colonial coin; landing London side up, we get a whole new cast of characters and another shift in tone, to something like “dirty realism”—the story of a poor working mother and her three small boys, who turn out to be none other than Red Head and Bash Man Goady's younger brothers. Snatched up by the President from her job as a dental assistant and made a “campaign secretary” (“She's a fine campaign secretary for twenty-five and stunning-looking, but her pussy hang down to her knee from dropping pickney every year since she seventeen”), she is sent to London to fabricate a sizable overseas-absentee vote, but paid so poorly she cannot save enough money to return home (and what sentimental perversity makes her wish to? her employers implicitly ask). There's a good deal of drudgery and despair in “Homing,” but the dirt is sweet. When she's assaulted by xenophobes at a telephone booth, the longer-lasting memory is of the way her children console her, and the way she refuses to poison them with hatred and fear.

If the play of D'Aguiar's prose in these first three sections, and the reach between subtext and text, has made for a refreshing unpredictability, it fails to prepare the reader for the sorrow and the power of “Dear Future,” twenty-six very short sections in the form of letters from Red Head to an idea. He and Bash Man Goady are still boys, and the letters refer to boyish pursuits like mudballs and slingshots, but it becomes clear they are in some way terribly alone and in some place terribly strange. All the images that have been gone over lightly—Granddad's refusal to allow Gamediser into his home; the spittle dripping off the boys’ wrestling uncle, Bounce, spat from a score of angry mouths; the spittle hanging threadlike from the mother's threadbare coat, spat from the tiny pursed mouths of two or three tiny weak minds; the children huddled in a room making dolls and a toy car from a matchbox and matches while in another room a door is being battered down—these images all flash again in a much harsher light, and D'Aguiar's novel emerges as not at all the book the reader seemed to be reading, a much angrier and despairing novel than the light hand has let on, warmhearted but disturbing, straightforward but off-center, all the happiness on a slight incline that has not seemed steep until the attempt to climb back up to it is attempted. “Dear Future,” writes Red Head the visionary, “You don't know me. We won't meet.”