The Sly Company of People Who Care

Where some early reviewers of this rich and exotic book have concentrated on Rahul Bhattacharya's debt to V S Naipaul, in some ways The Sly Company of People Who Care feels much closer to On the Road. The journey may be less symbolically and nationally significant, but in the narrator's unstructured wanderings and the compassionate detachment of his journalistic viewpoint, it strikes a similar chord to Jack Kerouac's classic American tale.

The narrator is a 22-year-old cricket reporter from India who comes to Guyana to explore the underbelly of this tiny country on the east coast of the South American continent: a country at once Indian, Caribbean and American; a country where cultural difference and similarity are absolutely woven into the fabric of society, language and landscape. He is lost and he has come to this place to find something of himself. He finds a land and a nation that has been exploited shamelessly by colonial powers but which seems at the same time to be a paradise on earth. What he finds too is a cast of extraordinary characters and friends who somehow knit this place together.

This is a book that manages quite easily to weave the best kind of honest and open-minded travel writing with elements of the novel, without ever quite coming down on either side. It is a feast of language and speech; mysterious, hypnotic and celebratory.