All in the devil's dictionary

THERE must have been times when Madison Smartt Bell wished he'd never bitten off this bloody chunk of late 18th-century Haitian history. Even after the tying up of his 500-page narrative, already teeming with enough permutations of ethnic conflict - between French and Haitian, black and white, mulatto and poor white (petit blanc), grand blanc and petit blanc, Spanish and French - to make Bosnia look straightforward, he still has to provide a 25-page chronology to show how his novel fits into an infinitely more complex net of racial and historical ironies. And this context is essential in order to understand the post-insurrection foreshadowing which occurs in each of the novel's major sections.

At this distance it's easy to see that delays in communication - carrying news to revolutionary France by ship, and then having edicts or armies despatched by return - was a huge factor in muddying Haitian political waters. By the time intervention was at hand, allegiances and power configurations in the colony would have moved irrevocably on. And if the worst you had to fear of the times in Paris was decapitation, in Port-au-Prince it was flaying alive.

Indeed, in a glossary of Voudoun (Voodoo) terminology, which Bell curiously labels "Another Devil's Dictionary", readers are apprised of more methods of removing skin, breaking bones and doing unmentionable things to eyeballs without actually snuffing out life than most will wish to know. The flipside of this livid horror is the portrayal of a reassuring humanity in several of Bell's characters: such figures as Toussaint l'Ouverture, a second- generation African slave who believes that with intelligent strategy and compassion he can become a black Spartacus, and Pere Bonne-Chance, a roly- poly messiah who lives openly with a Haitian wife and their brood of children but is otherwise a textbook saint.

It is the women of all hues (and 64 different shades of skin colour were then identified among mulattos) who give the drama its real spice. They range from the sexually insatiable pillar of society Madame Cigny to the mad Madame Arnaud, who wards off marauders by chopping off a finger, setting her hair alight or otherwise pretending that she is possessed, which, in a land where gods of the underworld intervene in warfare, is as good a tactic as any.

Since the period does not lend itself to easy encapsulation, and the epic does not seem to be Madison Smartt Bell's most comfortable scale, one senses that his enormous research may have had a dictatorial effect on his narrative rather than a liberating one. But if one message rises to the seething surface it is that under the skin, whatever colour that may be, lies as shocking a capacity for sadism and wickedness as there is a need for love and enlightenment.