Book review: Tales of Modern Jamaica

Nearly every Jamaican knows someone who has been threatened with a gun or a knife - or murdered." So writes Ian Thomson in his "fine and tough-minded guide to what he calls this 'corrupted Eden'", said Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times.

Blessed with rich natural resources and great beauty, Jamaica today is nevertheless afflicted with poverty, illiteracy, and a murder rate of 1,500 a year in a population of three million (putting it in the same league as South Africa and Colombia).

Thomson's book "presents a series of encounters with locals of all different colours and opinions, washed down with generous draughts of history and politics". He is somewhat "hypnotised" by Kingston’s violence and so fails to examine, for example, the calmer countryside. But The Dead Yard is "subtle and telling"; it will "give tourists heading for their walled compounds next winter a glimpse of what is going on around them".

At one point the author meets an elderly white Jamaican woman, said Andrea Stuart in the Independent, who tells him: "You visitors are always getting it wrong. Either it's golden beaches or it's guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing in between?" Thomson tries not to fall into this trap. He's successful, up to a point.

Anyone familiar with Jamaica will be impressed by the range of people he meets: "gunmen and officials, musicians and missionaries". He is also good on the history: the British decimated the indigenous population, then replaced them with African slaves; the violence and racial divisions that were central to the system of slavery still haunt the island, which is even now largely controlled by the descendants of the "plantocracy".

The book's great weakness, though, is that "it gives very little sense of what it feels like to be Jamaican".

The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, by Ian Thomson, 384pp (Faber & Faber, £14.99) The Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl p&p) ·