SOURCE: “The Nightmare Republic,” in New Statesman & Society, March 22, 1996, pp. 39-40.

In the following review, Burnett offers a positive assessment of Dear Future.

A megalomaniac leader whose dentist has planted a micro-transmitter in his rotten tooth to broadcast his secrets to the opposition takes an early-morning canter on the beach with his bodyguard. He ends up shooting the horse because the animal shies at the high-frequency noise. The country is recognisable as Guyana, where Fred D'Aguiar grew up, but it could be any state where politics has degenerated into a game of naked power.

Reminding us that he was a poet before he was a novelist, and that magic realism is as much at home in the Anglophone world as in the Latin countries, D'Aguiar is playing with the figure of the Guyanese bone flute. He updates it with a macabre humour that permeates this new book [Dear...