[In the following review, Burnett offers a positive assessment of Dear Future.]

A megalomaniac leader whose dentist has planted a micro-transmitter in his rotten tooth to broadcast his secrets to the opposition takes an early-morning canter on the beach with his bodyguard. He ends up shooting the horse because the animal shies at the high-frequency noise. The country is recognisable as Guyana, where Fred D'Aguiar grew up, but it could be any state where politics has degenerated into a game of naked power.

Reminding us that he was a poet before he was a novelist, and that magic realism is as much at home in the Anglophone world as in the Latin countries, D'Aguiar is playing with the figure of the Guyanese bone flute. He updates it with a macabre humour that permeates this new book [Dear Future]. His first novel was about slavery; this one traces the fortunes of a contemporary Caribbean “sea-split family” (to use a phrase of Andrew Salkey's).

The story becomes a song of innocence and experience. The harmless family at its centre—which manifests the Guyanese ideal of cultural and racial pluralism, symbolised by the colour red—is sucked into the vortex of degeneracy that passes for public life. It is a world where “progress”, as seen in the replacing of the old red sand road with the creeping black ribbon of tarmac, is heavily ironised.

D'Aguiar creates a powerful sense of the vulnerability of innocence, right from the opening scene in which a child is accidently struck on the head by a good-natured wood-chopping uncle. It is this boy, Red Head, whose consciousness dominates the book. He and his brother, part of an extended family in rural Guyana, dream of the return of their mother, who lives in London with three younger sons.

Doing her bit to oust the corrupt leader, she falsifies postal voters’ lists and struggles to survive in a mixed immigrant community rife with the double rip-off of capitalism and patriarchy. But at least the sons growing up in the sordid city (which she longs to clean) are left with a future. Time runs out for those in Guyana, in a memorable scene at the book's centre.

Political power-play is examined through the magnifying glass of trivial pursuits—the games ordinary people play. There are sports and small-town contests here, children's amusements and friendly rivalries. They give the book a foreground intricately embroidered with small figures at recreation, as in a Breughel marketplace. It is ingeniously constructed around the dynamic of the contest, with the domestic version placed in ever more urgent counterpoint with the wider power struggle. As it provokes questions about the power of the powerless, the novel's last hope is the sensitivity and imagination of ordinary folk.

Red Head narrates the final section. He addresses his future in spare language that makes the more decorative style of the rest (which has seemed irritatingly lax at times) resonate in retrospect with the pace of old-fashioned courtesies. D'Aguiar is shaping into a crafty storyteller who challenges his reader to think. His bone flute plays a haunting tune.