Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere deserves its reissue
The Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 people were killed and a US congressman was shot dead on a Guyanese airstrip, has been written about in dozens of books. Shiva Naipaul met some of those aspiring Jonestown authors loafing on a Georgetown hotel terrace. “Sex. Race. Suicide. Murder. Corruption. A hot Third World country. That’s a classic mix,” one said to him. There have been both forensic and lurid accounts of the Jonestown apocalypse, in which crowds of American expats were forcibly dosed with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, but nothing comes closer to its dark, post-colonial heart than Journey to Nowhere. The book was first published in 1981, three years after the massacre, but fell out of publication.
