Sketches in freehand

Roy Heath's fiction is wholly based in Guyana and explores family tensions mired in the country's social and political upheavals. His acknowledged talent, in novels like The Murderer, is the exposure of passions that can climax in a terrifying disintegration of morality. His new novel is no different. It reveals the nature of Guyana's decay between 1966 and 1992, a period when the Americans, hysterically fearful of communism, established and financed a fascistic regime. Political patronage, sexual thuggery, kleptomania and killings bankrupt the society, both morally and economically. Various forms of migration offer the only escape from the net of deceit and intrigue.

That Heath is able to name actual characters as murderers and victims testifies to the continuing role of the writer as political witness and archivist. It is also an acknowledgement of the spirit of openness in Guyana today. The post-Cold War period has seen a blooming of literature in Guyana that seeks not only to name the evils of the past but also to signpost the future.

Heath's hopefulness lies in the redemptive possibilities of art. His characters are variously trapped and muted in systems of greed, but each continues to struggle towards self-expression. The hero, Kwaku, is a fake herbalist healer and small-time hustler, but his garrulity and incessant story-telling mark him out as a folk artist. He is a wonderful liar, but his lies are life-giving. They create humour, whereas the lies of the politician are cynical and lack metaphorical colour.

The novel's theme, of art versus power, is made explicit in the character of Surinam, a painter who will not exhibit for tourists and whose refusal to sell himself contrasts with the politician's norm. Surinam's descent into madness mirrors the condition of his society. Anne Correia is a budding painter who ends up as the mistress of a corrupt minister. Her eventual escape is not a migration into the subconscious, as with Surinam, but to a remote part of Guyana where she lives among a pre-Columbian tribe.

Of course there is a certain hollowness in her utopianism, and Heath describes her escape to "a world far removed from coastal certainties" in Conradian terms . Kwaku is a storytelling liar; Surinam a rather precious artist; and Anne a seeker after bogus innocence. But for all their failings and lack of genuine artistic talent, they share a desire to cleanse themselves of the corruption of their environment.

Heath's novel is Guyanese not only in its social landscape but in its attempt at a native structure. The novel is populated with unevenly developed characters, and the narrative is interrupted by the sudden reappearance of some minor or unfinished figure. Long conversations end inconclusively, or else there are seemingly unnecessary digressions. Such refusal to come to the point can be irritating to a British reader. The lack of finish, however, conveys the spontaneity of Guyanese "orature", and challenges our expectations of what a novel should be.