El Salvador calls everything into question. Among foreign visitors there is an endemic paranoia, a profound sense that every moment harbours the possibility of a violent death. Deploying her full rhetorical weaponry, Joan Didion's [Salvador] takes us on a journey to the heart of the Salvadorean darkness. It evokes the unspeakable insanity effected by a well-intentioned imperialism gone terribly wrong….

Her critics will object that two weeks is insufficient time to make an expert of anyone. The objection is valid; but it entirely misconstrues Ms Didion's purpose. Salvador deliberately refrains from offering an economic, social or political analysis of the causes of the war; and in this sense, admittedly, it has only a partial truth to tell. It concentrates instead on capturing the atmosphere of a particularly horrific place at a particularly horrific time, to the exclusion of past or future concerns.

Dissolving the simple dichotomy of Left...