SOURCE: "Lost Worlds, Lost Heroes," in Saturday Review, Vol. 3, No. 4, November 15, 1975, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, DeMott calls Guerillas "continuously interesting," but argues that its protagonist lacks "substance," due more to changes in the socio-political climate of the day than Naipaul's skills as a writer.

A political novel, Guerillas takes for its hero an Orwellian Englishman named Peter Roche, who endures imprisonment and torture while serving the anti-apartheid cause in South Africa, and then moves on to Trinidad, obsessed now as before by the suffering of black people. For a time his tropical service as an anti-racist seems tame, even suburban. Roche has a house on Rich Folks' Ridge, a maid, a slot in the corporate structure, an identity among local establishmentarians both black and white, who see him as some kind of buffoon. ("He was not a professional man or businessman; he had none of the...