[The Viceroy of Ouidah is an] extraordinary fictional treatment of the life of a Brazilian slave-trader who ended his days in Dahomey, flamboyant, ruined, flawed, the god-like ancestor of generations of darker and darker-skinned descendants whom the author discovered when he was trying to write a factual history. His information was patchy and he decided to turn the story into fiction, which he has triumphantly done. From early 19th-century Brazil, he follows Francisco Manoel de Silva to Dahomey (now Benin) where the farouche hero sets up a sub kingdom, is patronised and then rejected by the fearsome king, saved by the king's half brother, and dies sadly, surrounded by his teeming offspring forever exiled from the Brazil he longs for.

It is flawed as fiction but has such an obsessional quality, such vigour and exactitude in the description of life beyond conventional boundaries that it is intensely powerful...