[In the following excerpt, Burnett offers a positive assessment of The Longest Memory.]

Two years on from the 1492 quincentenary, the Euro-American past still haunts British minds. Not only has the infant 23rd in line for the throne improbably been named Columbus, but London publishing has delivered four new novels addressing the shared transatlantic experience. Three of them have voyages at their heart. All revisit the guilt and suffering of the past, and all hold up to the light the racial encounters and moral conflicts of Atlantic history. …

Liberalism is taken apart in the poet Fred D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory. D'Aguiar, a British-born Guyanese, tackles the myth of the benign slave owner with a cleverly constructed tale set on a Virginia plantation, which exposes liberalism as self-interested and skin-deep. It tells the history of an Uncle Tom's betrayal of his runaway son, because he trusts his liberal master. The enigmatic story is unfolded through a series of separate narrations spoken by those involved, beginning with the disillusioned father, now ostracised as guilty by his own community, although he was the betrayed.

As speaker after speaker uses the same neutral language—eloquent, rational, ethical, low-key—impatience sets in, until it dawns that the apartheid of the fragmented narrations is cunningly transcended by this common idiom. The separate testimonies unravel, in all its tragic poignancy, a story of interracial rape in one generation balanced by doomed interracial love in the next. The black father's misplaced faith in liberalism is inverted in his son's resistance.

This deceptively simple book resonates long after it is finished; it addresses not only the dilemmas of the past but also today's generation gap in racial attitudes. D'Aguiar brings off the difficult feat of embracing, sincerely, both black militancy and a forgiving pluralism. “Memory is pain trying to resurrect itself,” concludes his old man. …