The Viceroy of Ouidah is far more fantastic than most novels, while being far closer to fact. The unbelievable brutality of the slave trade, and the smell of blood, are overpowering….

Extravagant though all [the details] … may seem, it is the discipline with which this book is written that is the most striking thing about it. Every temptation … to interpret, explain, embroider, enlarge, has been resisted. Bruce Chatwin's literary manner is stark and staccato. But his material is so baroque and suggestive that his short book seems longer and denser than it really is. It verges on being excessively 'decadent', hideously and ludicrously camp, a glittering sado-masochistic drag-act performed to the beat of the black man's drum. It is held back from the brink by strict compression—there must have been some hard-headed cutting—and by the sad and moral marriage the author makes between historic and poetic...