SOURCE: “Ocean Views,” in New Statesman & Society, September 2, 1994, pp. 36-7.

In the following excerpt, Burnett offers a positive assessment of The Longest Memory.

Two years on from the 1492 quincentenary, the Euro-American past still haunts British minds. Not only has the infant 23rd in line for the throne improbably been named Columbus, but London publishing has delivered four new novels addressing the shared transatlantic experience. Three of them have voyages at their heart. All revisit the guilt and suffering of the past, and all hold up to the light the racial encounters and moral conflicts of Atlantic history. …

Liberalism is taken apart in the poet Fred D'Aguiar's first novel, The Longest Memory. D'Aguiar, a British-born Guyanese, tackles the myth of the benign slave owner with a cleverly constructed tale set on a Virginia plantation, which exposes liberalism as self-interested and skin-deep. It tells the history of an Uncle Tom's...