The Dead Yard: Tales Of Modern Jamaica by Ian Thomson

From a distance, Jamaica is sunshine, cricket and Bob Marley. Up close, unhappier features obtrude: crack, Yardies and strenuously homophobic dancehall turns. Into this forbidding landscape steps Londoner Ian Thomson, "a privileged, detached, self-involved white man" with a "soft, educated face", by his own unsparing account. Cor lumme, what will become of our Ian?

He is, in fact, an old Caribbean hand, who wrote an acclaimed book about Haiti, Bonjour Blanc, (as well as a garlanded life of Primo Levi.) Though he balks at his first proffered spliff, he is soon getting high on ganja fumes. In order to comply with the dress code at Kingston Supreme Court, he even dresses like a ragga MC himself, "in sky-blue nylon trousers with IMAGINATION picked out in sequins on the right buttock". A rum-swilling monsignor guides Thomson through bloodstained ghettoes. The priest's parrot keeps him awake at night with cries of "Holy Father! Holy Father!". There are expeditions in search of crocs, fancy birds and orchids. Thomson's talent for butterfly-netting exotic specimens, and fixing them with limpid prose, invites comparison with the late grand master of the travelogue, Norman Lewis.

In the ruin of a homestead, a white farmer called Cooke, "a thin man bent double with age, punted towards me with the aid of a bamboo pole". That "punted" is terrific. The Dead Yard reads like an updating of Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, with Thomson cast as the decent Tony Last, doomed to end his days indulging Maroons and eccentrics in the tropics.

His burden is not reading Dickens to the hateful Mr Todd but sipping Bristol Cream with a Jamaican woman who has retired from a nursing job in London. Her "steward" wheels in a drinks trolley got up as "a blackamoor butler & with a dinky bow tie and tails.

Tiny glasses of sherry were balanced on the butler's outstretched tray & my host was taking this bizarre ritual of English afternoon tea very seriously but secretly I despised it." More than one entertaining encounter ends this way, with the author policing his text in case he should nod and allow anything resembling a colonial attitude to get through.

The Dead Yard is an indictment of the profound psychological wound inflicted on Jamaica by slavery and British dominion, as Thomson sees it, as well as the corruption and even gun-running of local politicians. The narrative is tinged with melancholy, which is explained when Thomson attends a wake for a man who is "on ice" at home, in the "dead yard" of the title: the author's own father had recently died.

At times, he is in danger of sounding priggish. "A kind of political correctness dictates one shouldn't be too unkind about Bob Marley," he says. Does the first superstar of the developing world really deserve this condescension? Thomson neglects cricket, perhaps because it is a legacy of imperial rule but this is like writing a book about Wales without mentioning rugby.

As for that much advertised sunshine, it serves only to attract incurious tourists to their "stockaded resorts". But The Dead Yard is agreeably dry and stimulating.

In its own way, it goes to the head like a second can of Red Stripe at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Jamaica used to be the source of much of Britain's wealth, an island where slaves grew sugar and the money flowed out in vast quantities. It was a tropical paradise for the planters, a Babylonian exile for the Africans shipped to the Caribbean. Since independence in 1962, it has gradually become associated with a new kind of hell, a society where extreme violence has become ordinary and gangs control the areas where most Jamaicans live. Ian Thomson's brave new book explores a country of lost promise, a country that most older Jamaicans in Britain cannot recognise as their own.Once a beacon of optimistic third world politics, the island is now sunk in corruption, hopelessness and drug wars. Jamaica's music was once the lilting anthem of idealists everywhere; now it is a repetitive glorification of homophobia and violence. Thomson walks the streets and rides the buses that most middle class Jamaicans, let alone white visitors, avoid like the plague. He describes poverty, the reality of gang rule and police brutality. He meets Jamaicans who are trying to make a difference, and astonishingly complacent members of the elite. This is an unforgettable portrait of a country that has had a huge influence on British culture, for good and ill.