Jonestown in Guyana ranks as one of two or three named cults that remain etched into the memory of anyone who has paid attention to news over time. And like me, anyone who has researched cults, new religions, social scams, and manipulative business ventures throughout the decades is bound to have heard and read too much about Jonestown, where nearly one thousand men, women, and children died of a ritual suicide-murder event.
Only Charles Manson and his Family cult, I’ve noticed, has drawn more attention—I think partly due to populist racism: Manson’s story was all about taking over the world after his Family murdered White people, leaving signs that Blacks did so to start a race war. Only White people died in the Manson story; whereas at Jonestown, 70% who died were Black. And no one has made a movie about Jonestown (yet) that compares to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.2
But Annie Dawid’s book moves us to read this new account with her addition of a fictional element to drive the true story of Jonestown. Paradise Undone. . . reads more like a selection of character studies and a news report than a typical novel. Within that structure, the author retells the story of the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones into the cult’s horrific ending in 1978.
Dawid spent years researching the facts and stories about Peoples Temple, then she made a dogged effort to get her manuscript accepted by a reputable publisher. Her diligence shows in the details and nuances about the group’s history and what life was like as a member.
Overall, the chapters work quite well as facets to describe the larger story through individual narratives. For example, one of the fictitious Black characters, Watts Freeman, as an old man, tells his experience with the Temple as a young, troubled man and how he escaped as the murder-suicide was taking place. He then returned to help the authorities identify the quickly deteriorating bodies lying bloated in the humid jungle surrounding them.
The reporter character throughout the story is a Black woman with seasoned journalistic chops. She records the session with Watts for a radio program about the cult for the fortieth anniversary in 2018. That same reporter arrives at the end of the novel with a film crew to document the fortieth anniversary event at the Oakland, California cemetery where the hundreds of Jonestown victims are interred along with the leader, Jim Jones.
Most characters in the novel are fictitious, but some, including Marceline Jones, the long suffering though complicit wife of Jim Jones, appear by real name. We are treated to an intimate look into Marceline’s character, feelings, and thoughts as she struggles with what her husband was about to do on that fateful day of November 18, 1978. In the end, Marceline complies, as she always had from the beginning, with the ideals for the principle of a utopian communist world that her husband used as bait to keep the people in line. She complies, despite knowing of her husband’s lurid sexual affairs with women and men, his drug use, and his self-serving lies about being God. She takes the so-called Kool-Aid and dies near her husband, whose life ended that fateful day with a bullet in his head. The novel tells us that Jim Jones, despite his drug-induced delirium, was too cowardly to face the discomfort of cyanide poisoning, which he ordered hundreds of adults and children to endure, whether voluntarily or by forced injection. The open question remains: Did he shoot himself or did one of his murderous crew do him the favor?
One of the most interesting characters to me is a buxom White member whom Jones named Truth when she first approached him as an idealistic college student to join his church. Jones kept Truth away from Jonestown so she could help manage things stateside. She later felt cheated of the experience and total sacrifice of her Temple family. Ten years after the “Event,” as the day of November 18 is referred to in the novel, Truth (then 36) traveled to Guyana with a mission. She let fate guide her. The first handsome Guyanese Black man she saw upon landing at Georgetown she seduced, so she could have a Black baby in honor of the holy experiment that was Jonestown. She never saw the father of her only child again. Her second goal at 36 was to visit Jonestown for the first time. She went alone, carrying a backpack. By that time, the jungle had reclaimed almost everything, leaving parts of the main pavilion and some decaying furniture.
At that point, Truth’s first doubts about her cult began to arise. Why did they have to kill the babies and kids? As the novel progresses in time, we learn that Truth’s son (named Cuffy after a Guyanese rebel) was close to classmates whose families broadened Truth’s ideas of social reality. She studied sociology and learned of Robert Lifton’s treatise on brainwashing, which she read. In that process, we see her emerging from her idealistic cult self.
Overall, the novel accomplishes its task to get the reader inside the heads of significant characters, including one among them who was Guyanese, who could tell the story from their unique, personal experiences. As a reader, the feeling of being a part of the Jonestown experiment comes across well to me and resolves by the end in a finely wrought portrait gallery of some of the actors in the tragedy directed by Jim Jones.
As I read, I noted a few minor errors of fact. For example, cult leader Rajneesh in truth, accumulated nearly 90 Rolls Royce luxury sedans, not 28. And some of the dialog mimicking Black speech felt caricatured to me.
The line drawing of the cover art depicts a mob of devoted children and adults with outstretched arms following a leader in sunglasses who is holding a cross. All are reaching out and advancing in unison, guided by a red sign pointing forward with Guiana painted in large letters across it. But for me, the art, though well done as a cartoon, misses the author’s intent of communicating the importance of avoiding sensational stereotypes about cult life at Jonestown. The cover art unfortunately, for me at least, emphasizes a popular cult-leader stereotype of a pied piper leading entranced children to their demise. The novel tells us that the relationships between leader and flock were far more complex.
The novel contains some brilliant passages in the chapter that describes the intensity, confusion, and unfolding horror of November 18, during which only a few found the clarity, the means, and the will to escape. A few glimmers of goodness emerge from this novel through those who managed to escape and thrive despite the painful memories of their participation. The reality of why and how people followed Jim Jones is the human story the novel aspires to tell.
