[Love and Death in a Hot Country], Naipaul's subtly crafted account of abandonment and degeneration in a thinly-veiled version of Guyana, focuses on two casualties of the new redemptive order, Dina and Aubrey St. Pierre, whose marriage is suffering its own parallel decline. Disgusted by the lavish promises of the electoral masquerade, the St. Pierres inhabit a political and psychological void between the vanishing past and the balloting's foregone conclusion. In divergent ways, their lives assume a frustration and incompleteness that obliquely but unmistakably reflects Cuyama's apparently hopeless course. (p. 20)

Naipaul's portrait of a nation coming apart before having a chance to take political or cultural shape is neither explosive or overtly dramatic. His is a vision of gradual decomposition, tautly revealed in personal histories, the rhythms of daily life and details of the landscape….

Love and Death in a Hot Country draws much of its inspiration from the author's nightmarish trip to Guyana several years ago, recorded in Journey to Nowhere (1980), an extended report on the Jonestown massacre. Some revolutionary terminology and bits of conversation reappear exactly as they did in the earlier volume. Perhaps because Naipaul is dealing here with characters he created, though, the novel exhibits a tone of genuine sympathy for those condemned, through no fault of their own, to endure the whims of a brutal dictatorship modeled after the autocratic rule of black President Forbes Burnham. Journey to Nowhere all too often drifted into facile contempt for the Guyanese, portrayed as fatuous or irremediably ignorant. Nor did it have any patience for the credulous, manipulable Americans, whom the writer held responsible for the phenomenon of Jim Jones.

Naipaul observes in his documentary account that politics in Guyana had a racial basis: Lines were drawn according to deep and often violent hostilities dividing the black and Indian populations. Similar hatred underlies the novel's action, taking the form of an official ideology that infuses the black characters. Indeed, their venom approaches hysteria. The author, a native of Trinidad where blacks and Indians are roughly equal in number, would likely take issue with any notion of racially determined behavior. Nevertheless, he seems to be suggesting that racism in the developing world does not necessarily have its source in dealings between "imperialists" and newly independent peoples.

But most impressive is this book's success as fiction. Emerging from Naipaul's despairing view of "liberation" is his wondrous, near-poetic description, his acute sensitivity to the complicated interplay of public and private, and his uncanny skill at fashioning realistic people out of circumstances that lead many novelists into wild exaggerations. Moving closer to his distinguished brother's skepticism about human nature, Shiva Naipaul has given us starkness amid lushness, politics stillborn in an atmosphere of gloom. (p. 21)