{"id":174700,"date":"2026-08-06T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174700"},"modified":"2026-08-07T12:11:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T16:11:58","slug":"no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul\u2019s Jonestown"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Courtesy of The Jonestown Institute<\/a> at San Diego State University, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

From the outset there seemed to be little mystery as to the facts of the case at Jonestown. The victims included over nine hundred men, women, and children of People\u2019s Temple, the majority of them Black Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area (which matters). The scene of the crime was an agricultural commune in the South American nation of Guyana (not a coincidence). The murder weapon (the word \u201csuicide\u201d here would be imprecise) was a blend of poisons mixed into a powdered drink called Fla-Vor-Aid. The culprit was the Reverend Jim Jones and his motive was simple: to spare his flock their impending annihilation at the hands of the United States government. Jones had talked about this prospect incessantly, obsessively, for a long time. There had been rehearsals.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the question is why so many people decided to kill themselves, the first answer has to be that a lot of them didn\u2019t. Many syringes were found at the scene among the plastic cups. There was no meaningful notion of choice at Jonestown; Jones\u2019s command to take the poison was enforced by men with guns. A third of the victims were children. Atrocities of that scale tend to have world-historic causes. But in the aftermath of that awful night on November 18, 1978, public inquiries mostly focused on the morbid explanations (cultology, groupthink, leader-worship, etc). Whatever else Jonestown was, it was the result of an accretion of human choices, many of them rational, and yet few writers investigated the political circumstances that had allowed a mad cleric to assume such earthly power in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was this possibility\u2014that Jonestown was best understood as a vast political catastrophe\u2014that most interested Shiva Naipaul. Younger brother of the better-known Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.), Naipaul was quick to see in Jonestown a story about much more than a cult. In the weeks and months after November 18, he observed, no one who had supported Jones and People\u2019s Temple from afar had accepted any degree of responsibility.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy, <\/i>Naipaul\u2019s contemptuous postmortem of Jonestown first published in 1982, was different from the tawdry expos\u00e9s of the journalists, entrepreneurs, and former Jones-followers who rushed to sign book contracts before the corpses had even been buried. Then in his mid-thirties, Naipaul was Indian from Trinidad, who knew that part of the Caribbean. He was also a writer of fiction rather than conventional reportage. But <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i>\u2019s greatest divergence from the Jonestown canon is the degree to which its narrative is propelled by its author\u2019s sense of moral outrage. Naipaul is less concerned with the fates of the victims than the ideas that fed the perpetrators\u2014not all of whom, he believed, perished in Guyana. The result<\/span> is a little masterpiece of skeptical inquest, as virtuosic as H.L. Mencken on religious fanatics and fraudsters of the twenties, but ill at ease from its very first sentence: \u201cAt Piarco Airport in Trinidad, I nearly jumped ship.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Journey to Nowhere<\/em> by Shiva Naipaul. Outsider Editions.<\/p><\/div>\n

Out of print for decades, and<\/span> newly reissued by Outsider Editions, <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> is the crest of Shiva Naipaul\u2019s abbreviated career as a journalist: some of the finest prose one could ever read about one of the bleakest subjects one could ever contemplate. Subsequent scholarship, written with the aid of archival sources, has yielded better books for understanding Jonestown. But there is no better book for understanding Shiva Naipaul, an immense talent and tragic figure whose name has long been associated with phrases like \u201cunjustly overlooked,\u201d \u201cbasically forgotten,\u201d and \u201cyounger brother.\u201d <\/span>Journey to Nowhere <\/span><\/i>is a reminder that his investigation into the mystery of Jonestown is inseparable from the conundrum of his own biography, from the void of the career he might have had and the eclipse of the one he did by his Nobelist elder brother. For Naipaul was also, it turns out, something like a late casualty of Jim Jones\u2019s mania.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

V.S. Naipaul once told the critic Adam Shatz that there are two kinds of writers: writers and missionaries. The latter subordinate themselves to some vision of social uplift\u2014to politics, in a word. The Naipauls understood themselves to serve a higher purpose, free from the alleged distortions of sentiment. Much of the elder\u2019s reporting from Africa and the Middle East, especially, was scornful, ill-informed, and racist by any measure. Yet at its finest, V.S. Naipaul\u2019s journalism brought something new and needed to the rather anodyne genre of travel writing. \u201cI hadn\u2019t realised that you could write about your ancestral country and people with such raw honesty,\u201d Pankaj Mishra told the<\/span>\u00a0Guardian<\/span><\/i> about his teenage discovery of Naipaul\u2019s <\/span>An Area of Darkness<\/span><\/i> (1964), \u201cor that you could so fearlessly expose your own rages and neuroses.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Journey to Nowhere <\/span><\/i>belongs to the resurgence of Anglophone travel writing in the seventies and eighties that his brother helped inspire\u2014with an investigative, even prosecutorial bent. The last thing the victims at Jonestown needed was another missionary, Naipaul decided. The book\u2019s service, and much of its freshness, lies in its fusion of indignation and irreverence; pungent, observational wit of this grade, trained on such an intense tragedy, is strange to encounter today. We tend to think of cynicism and sympathy as very distant feelings, but the best cynics are like watchdogs. Any question was worth asking, any eminence was worth embarrassing, if another Jonestown might be prevented.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s two-part structure, set first in Guyana and then the U.S., reflects its thesis: the People\u2019s Temple of Jim Jones and the Guyana of President Forbes Burnham that hosted it were animated by similar strains of ideological delusion that compounded into a kind of deranged feedback loop. \u201cIt is hardly a cause for astonishment,\u201d he writes, \u201cthat the two regimes were drawn to one another.\u201d In Guyana, Naipaul finds an insular country under the thumb of an opportunist with a cult of personality, heavily militarized and secret-policed, embarked on a shaky course of economic development centered around cooperative agriculture. Burnham had been installed by the CIA in the sixties, but a decade later he\u2019d adopted a syncretic mix of Third-Worldism, Marxism-Leninism, and Black Power\u2014all bunk, in Naipaul\u2019s view. Burnham\u2019s promises to build a flourishing, self-reliant economy protected from craven Yankee imperialists mirrored those of Jones to his followers. Accordingly, Guyana was happy to lease People\u2019s Temple a parcel of land in the jungle and receive the exodus of San Francisco faithful.<\/span><\/p>\n

To Jones, Burnham was one more easy mark\u2014but Naipaul thought it was Burnham\u2019s left-wing politics, more than his opportunism, that made him so. Naipaul, a jaded, part-time resident of the Bay Area, saw a close correspondence between Jones\u2019s brand of messianism and Burnham\u2019s political style of liberatory, socialist anti-imperialism. In each case, salvation was said to be close at hand but enemies were everywhere; only the leader could be trusted. \u201cJim Jones built his movement on the debris of the sixties,\u201d he writes, \u201con its frustrations, failures and apostasies.\u201d He gathered people who longed to be saved and found a patron in Burnham, as cunning as he was in guarantees of deliverance. <\/span>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The American side of the story, meanwhile, is about how Jones exploited sixties militancy and New Age woo-woo to make People\u2019s Temple a serious player in Bay Area politics. At a time when the energies of Black Power, the women\u2019s movement, and gay liberation were finding new expression in the electoral arena, Jones was both a reminder of what true faith looked like\u2014an old-fashioned populist\u2014and a canny operator, capable of mobilizing large numbers of voters for candidates he favored. It\u2019s true that Jones and People\u2019s Temple were feted by the Democratic Party establishment in California. The sitting mayor, George Moscone, may have owed his election victory to Jones\u2019s voter turnout drives (a practice Jones would repeat in Guyana); City Supervisor Harvey Milk had mounted many public defenses of People\u2019s Temple; State assemblyman and future mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown had even considered Jones a friend. Naipaul\u2019s interview with Brown gets him nowhere: \u201cHow, I asked, had [Jones] been able to accumulate that kind of power? That, Brown said, was one of the mysteries of the whole business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Naipaul\u2019s real scorn, though, is for the radicals who enabled Jones\u2019s rise by hailing him as an authentic revolutionary\u2014figures like the Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, who offered Jones \u201cmoral support\u201d and whose concept of \u201crevolutionary suicide\u201d he warped to fit his own millenarian, homicidal agenda. Naipaul finds Newton in Oakland, many years removed from political relevance and from sobriety. \u201cI suppose we have to be more careful about the sorts of people and organizations we get involved with in the future,\u201d he says.<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The writer Farrukh Dhondy, who was friendly with Naipaul in London despite their political differences, pegged Naipaul\u2019s anti-leftism as pure reflex. \u201cHis mockery of socialists didn\u2019t seem to derive from any firm commitment to capitalistic or feudalistic principles\u201d Dhondy recalls in <\/span>his memoir<\/span><\/a>. It \u201cseemed a visceral reaction. It was as though he had inherited the conviction as people of faith or ultra-nationalists do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That would go some way toward explaining Naipaul\u2019s disposition in <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> as well the limits of his inquiry. So intently does he focus on Jones and Burnham\u2019s ideological maneuvers that he looks right past the waving hands of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s most storied priesthood of chaos. If Burnham\u2019s political project was as important a precondition for Jonestown as Naipaul insists, might this story hold a lesson, too, about the unintended consequences of CIA meddling in Latin America? Why hold Huey Newton\u2019s feet to the fire, but not also the former CIA director John McCone, who oversaw the Guyana operation? Naipaul missed an incredible opportunity to thicken the plot: McCone came from San Francisco, of all places.<\/span><\/p>\n

While Naipaul derides the zelaous\u2014particularly the office-class cadre at Jonestown, whose ranks were disproportionately white in this multiracial church\u2014<\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> offers little insight into the motivations of average parishioners, most of whom were working class Black Americans. \u201cThe real attraction\u201d of People\u2019s Temple, Naipaul argued, came not from the welfare services the church provided but \u201cfrom the sense of belonging that the Temple provided.\u201d He may be right about that, but he doesn\u2019t delve much deeper, or ask what appealed about the fraternity they found there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, at various points the posture Naipaul assumes in <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> recalls what Edward Said once wrote of his brother: the travel writer \u201cunencumbered with much knowledge or information\u201d and \u201cunrestrained by genuine learning or self-education.\u201d Naipaul writes scathingly, for example, of his encounter with a Guyanese man looking to exchange currency\u2014not because of the request, but because of the \u201ccompleteness of his corruption, his degeneracy,\u201d as Naipaul puts it. \u201cHe was an exhalation of the moral decay I could sense all around me. The society had robbed him of his humanity. It allowed virtually no one to be fully human.\u201d A little much.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

The reporting of <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> appears to have robbed Naipaul of something that he would never recoup. \u201cHe was dispirited by the experience,\u201d Paul Theroux has written, \u201cand for a while it rendered him mute. He suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown during the writing of the book.\u201d When Naipaul\u2019s father-in-law suggested that for his next book he return to the lighter, comic tone of his novels, he replied: \u201cHow can I? I have walked over the bodies in Jonestown.\u201d This time he wasn\u2019t being melodramatic. On his tour of the site, near the main pavilion where \u201cmost of the bodies had lain, piled three or four deep \u2026 leaking away into the Guyanese soil,\u201d the stench of putrefaction was still overwhelming. The wooden planks laid as walkways sank and plunged him into human compost up to his ankles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Naipaul speculated to friends that he would die young, from the same cardiac ailment that killed his father at the age of forty-six. As it happened he lived only until forty, dying from a heart attack in 1985. (\u201cHe was a drinking man,\u201d V.S. Naipaul <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> much later, \u201cand I had seen death on his face the previous year, at the funeral of my younger sister.\u201d) Martin Amis declared it a tragedy for English literature, a loss of nothing less than \u201cthirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s an insult to Shiva Naipaul\u2019s memory to hope that if he had lived, the nascent genius of his early work might have outgrown<\/span> his cynicism. Something in him would have had to give, so that the chauvinism and despair that are so close to the surface in <\/span>Journey to Nowhere<\/span><\/i> would not ultimately win out over the curiosity and moral outrage that drove him to write the book in the first place. The Shiva Naipaul who was most alive to sympathy is the one I wish had written ten more books this deft and droll, who I wish was still writing today. (He would be 81.) One of many sad things about this story is that the Shiva Naipaul I am talking about probably died long before his heart attack.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Holter is a writer and historian, and the editor of the Murray Kempton collection <\/em>Going Around: Selected Journalism (Seven Stories Press). His work has appeared in <\/em>The Baffler, Boston Review, The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Times Literary Supplement, Places Journal, and <\/em>The Drift, among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no better book for understanding Shiva Naipaul, a tragic figure whose name has long been associated with phrases like \u201cunjustly overlooked,\u201d \u201cbasically forgotten,\u201d and \u201cyounger brother.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":887,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31215],"tags":[7183,29466,68907,68908,68906,5143,976],"class_list":["post-174700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-books","tag-hua-hsu","tag-jim-jones","tag-jonestown","tag-journey-to-nowhere","tag-shiva-naipaul","tag-travel-writing","tag-v-s-naipaul"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNo More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul\u2019s Jonestown by Andrew Holter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 6, 2026 \u2013 There is no better book for understanding Shiva Naipaul, a tragic figure whose name has long been associated with phrases like \u201cunjustly overlooked,\u201d \u201cbasically forgotten,\u201d and \u201cyounger brother.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul\u2019s Jonestown by Andrew Holter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 6, 2026 \u2013 There is no better book for understanding Shiva Naipaul, a tragic figure whose name has long been associated with phrases like \u201cunjustly overlooked,\u201d \u201cbasically forgotten,\u201d and \u201cyounger brother.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-06T14:00:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-08-07T16:11:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1280px-jonestown-entrance.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"902\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Andrew Holter\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Andrew Holter\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Andrew Holter\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6cc9a8af1a32e9adaea9ca6607ab0cdd\"},\"headline\":\"No More Missionaries: Shiva Naipaul\u2019s Jonestown\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-06T14:00:38+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-08-07T16:11:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/\"},\"wordCount\":2317,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/08\/06\/no-more-missionaries-shiva-naipauls-jonestown\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/1280px-jonestown-entrance-1024x722.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Hua Hsu\",\"Jim Jones\",\"Jonestown\",\"Journey to Nowhere\",\"Shiva Naipaul\",\"travel writing\",\"V. 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