SOURCE: "Hopes or Illusions," in The Canadian Forum, February/March, 1989, pp. 31-2.

Below, Côté gives strong praise for the tone and content of A Casual Brutality.

In his first novel published three years after the remarkable collection of short stories Digging Up the Mountains, Neil Bissoondath has forged a powerful story of exploitation and violence set on a West Indian colonial island, recently proclaimed independent. First novels often show the greatest strengths and weaknesses of writers: often the style is uneven, the content overworked. A Casual Brutality carries none of these flaws; it is the work of a sure hand and disciplined mind.

A kind of double helix forms the structure of the novel beginning with the end of the novel in the departures room of the small Casaquemada airport. The first storyline is the present: a story without hope of the last days the narrative character...