Jonestown

Description

Wilson Harris’ 1996 novel Jonestown charts the attempt of a survivor of the mass suicide and killings at Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana, to come to terms with his survival and the others’ deaths. While the events of November 18, 1978 form the background of the novel, Harris is not writing a history of Jonestown, Jim Jones, or even the fictional survivor, Francisco Bone. Instead, he is looking through what the narrator calls a Dream-book: “I feared to write in – and be written by – a demanding book that asserts itself in Dream and questions itself from time to time (even as I question the meaning of survival) as you will see as you read”. In the course of the novel, Francisco Bone will move through his past to explore how he came to be associated with Jim Jones, the connections of Jones to Guyana, and the circumstances surrounding his salvation in the events in Jonestown that November.

Description

"'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks ... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? Was Jonestown the latest manifestation of the breakdown of populations within the hidden flexibilities and inflexibilities of pre-Columbian civilizations? The Maya were certainly one of the great civilizations of ancient America and the fate of their cities - such as Palenque, Chichen Itza, Tikal, Bonampak - has left unanswered questions.'" "Bone is narrator and fictional survivor of the mass-suicide at Jonestown in the remote Guyana forest in 1978. In a Dream-book he tries to heal the trauma he suffered and, interweaving past and future, journeys into his childhood and education and explores his association with the charismatic leader, Jonah Jones, in Guyana and America. In setting out his account he is drawn into the Mayan concept of time which twins past and future, giving his narrative the compulsive eloquence of dream. The result is a striking demonstration, after more than thirty years, of the continuing power of Wilson Harris's imagination." --Book Jacket.

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