Surprisingly—because we tend to dismiss critics turned novelist—The Insect Colony is a fine novel. Larson has a novelist's sensibility. He uses various novelistic techniques such as split narration, varying levels of perception, movement through time zones and the ending of every chapter with a startling revelation or question. Hunter Schuld, an entomologist, has returned to West Africa to study spiders. Metaphorically, everybody gets caught in a web of connections—an image Larson may have picked up from West African writers like Wole Soyinka, but one which works both because of the details of web construction and because we are made to see connections between people, sensibilities and histories.

The Insect Colony is not an African novel, nor does the author claim it to be such. On the contrary: explicit references are made to Graham Greene's African novels and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like its literary antecedents...