There is no denying the brilliance of Bruce Chatwin's book. The prose coruscates, so that many images from this African horror story linger disturbingly in the mind.

Yet you are left wondering what to make of The Viceroy of Ouidah. The tale's bare bones (a fitting metaphor) concern a young Brazilian who set himself up on the slave coast of Dahomey in the early 19th century and grew rich from the many human cargoes he shipped back to South America, until the dark continent wreaked its dreadful revenge upon him.

This may be taken as a superb, impressionistic piece of historical reconstruction, although Chatwin carefully calls it "a work of imagination."…

So the way to approach this brief, splendid book is to put aside any agonizing about truth (even the Aristotelian sort) and treat it as an "entertainment," in Graham Greene's use of the word.

The story begins...