This is a difficult book to comment on; Russell is an amazing prose writer, and some of his other books are genuine masterpieces. This is an uncomfortable book to read..it's written in a kind of experimental post-modernist style, with the person of the narrator and his name as well as the names of several other characters changing throughout the book. I guess it might resemble a post-impressionist Cubist painting, with different persons and points of view and names and alternate versions of events serving up a very real sense of what Jamaica might have been like at the time of his writing, but leaving the reader unsure about what just happened and what it all might mean.