Between 1945 and 2001, there was no greater U.S. disaster than Jonestown. On Nov. 18, 1978, 918 Americans, including over 300 children, died in the mass murder-suicide orchestrated by cult leader Jim Jones, a preacher turned revolutionary leader. After his followers murdered a U.S. congressman who had come to investigate human rights abuses at Jonestown, a paranoid Jones believed the end was nigh, and he pushed his commune to drink cyanide-laced fruit punch, some voluntarily, some at gunpoint. For weeks, the story dominated front pages in the United States. Even today, Kool-Aid, the flavored drink powder, carries dark associations—even though the actual poisoned drink was a lesser-known brand, Flavor Aid.

But this very American story took place outside U.S. borders, in the tiny South American country of Guyana. Jones’s cult, the Peoples Temple, had decamped there to found its own colony, with approval from the Guyanese government, after increasing scrutiny over the Temple’s practices and finances in the United States. For most of the reporters and authors who flocked to Jonestown after the tragedy, Guyana was just a backdrop.

But this very American story took place outside U.S. borders, in the tiny South American country of Guyana. Jones’s cult, the Peoples Temple, had decamped there to found its own colony, with approval from the Guyanese government, after increasing scrutiny over the Temple’s practices and finances in the United States. For most of the reporters and authors who flocked to Jonestown after the tragedy, Guyana was just a backdrop.

Trinidadian British writer Shiva Naipaul’s book, Journey to Nowhere, originally published in 1980, tries to put Guyana back into the Jonestown story. The book’s original U.K. title, Black & White, was more apposite: This is a story very much about race, racial politics, and division. Naipaul wrote not only of the divisions inside Guyanese society, but about the often-overlooked racial politics of the Peoples Temple itself, where a white one-time civil rights preacher initiated the mass killing of a largely Black congregation.

Jonestown is well-trodden ground for authors, but Naipaul’s book is being released as part of a new series from Doubleday, Outsider Editions, which focuses on “overlooked” books “outside the traditional canon.” The press release for this edition of Journey to Nowhere calls the book a “masterpiece of modern reportage.” Yet this is an overstatement. While these are fascinating topics, here, they are clumsily handled. Naipaul’s book, ostensibly about the massacre, is full of racial and literary insecurity, not reportage. Ironically for an Outsider book, Naipaul, a Indo-Trinidadianand Oxford graduate, adopts all the snobbery of the British conservative establishment at the time. That makes it interesting as a cultural artifact but ultimately tells us very little about the tragedy in Guyana, or about its roots in California’s racial divisions and progressive politics.

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Naipaul was the younger brother of V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel prize winner, a writer of genius and world-class shit. That’s a tough act to follow, especially when you take up your brother’s profession and seem to be stuck imitating his themes.

Journey to Nowhere is treading over the same territory as his brother’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River, which was set in an unnamed African nation after independence: namely, the post-colonial world and the insecure place of Indian communities in newly independent Black countries. When V.S. Naipaul’s novel came out, the expulsion of Uganda’s Indians was only a few years past; some other African nations, such as Kenya, had squeezed out thousands of Indian citizens. As Naipaul the younger frames it in Journey to Nowhere, “The excesses of an unrestrained and cynical black supremacy were at hand.”

Guyana’s 1970s politics were intensely racialized, headed by the Afro-Guyanese autocrat Forbes Burnham with a largely Indo-Guyanese opposition. In Journey to Nowhere, Shiva Naipaul finds a country both stagnant and deluded, ready to sign off on Jones’ deranged fantasies out of a combination of revolutionary and racial solidarity. Jones, fleeing tax investigations and angry relatives of cult members, envisaged a mixed-race utopia in the jungle where a new order could be established, one with him at the top as an unquestioned “father.”

As Naipaul arrives in the country, the catastrophe is reverberating through Guyanese politics. Government ministers tell absurd lies, visits are delayed, relatives of the Jonestown dead are smeared. Naipaul portrays Guyana as a place where members of each group, Black and Indian, are out only for their own, and are willing to overlook incompetence and criminality as a result.

Unfortunately, Naipaul’s view is also steeped in his own racism. “In Guyana, the atavistic ideal of the Big Black Chief—the archetype so superbly realized by [Ugandan dictator] Idi Amin—has, despite the socialist gloss, been almost fully achieved,” he writes. “Although Indians form the majority of the population, black supremacy reigns unchecked.”

The recurrent bigotry makes for an unpleasant read, especially when it comes to Naipaul’s portrayal of his native Trinidad, which he returns to just before visiting Guyana. “Young, marijuana-doped blacks with matted hair stalked the streets. They symbolized the regression, the primitivist impulses seething through the lower reaches of the society,” he complains, saying their numbers have swollen since his last visit. Trinidad, he adds, is going through “a cultural and intellectual regression that is now widespread in the region”—one that, for Naipaul, is inseparable from Blackness. “Third Worldhood had bred regression, and that regression was ending in personal and political catastrophe.”

This is ugly stuff, but these were his brother’s prejudices too. As V.S. Naipaul put it, according to his unsympathetic biographer and former friend Paul Theroux, “Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand.” Africa in A Bend in the River is atavistic and unsavable, trapped in an eternally primitive state.

But for all his flaws, V.S. Naipaul was an extraordinarily gifted writer. The bleakness of his vision of human nature could be revelatory and sometimes compassionate, rather than just cynical. (A Bend in the River has one of the finest opening lines in literature: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”)

Shiva Naipaul, on the other hand, never manages to make the leap between group prejudice and individual empathy. After deciding that Guyana’s welcoming of Jonestown was a result of Black supremacy leading to utopian delusion, he sticks to the line relentlessly. Naipaul’s determination to see Jonestown as a product of Guyanese racial fantasy also means he misses most of what actually made the relationship between the Peoples Temple and Burnham’s government interesting. A fire—widely believed to have been deliberate arson—destroyed the records of their communications in 1979, but Jones very successfully wooed political leaders through old-fashioned means: money and sex.

There was a long tradition of outsiders coming to Guyana and bringing money and jobs with them—but they were missionaries, for the most part, not revolutionaries. Guyana’s leadership may have trusted Jones because of his collar more than his communist credentials. The nitty-gritty of all this would be fascinating, but it would require much more time than Naipaul spent in the country, and much more effort to understand Guyanese politics.

Instead, Naipaul offers a broad sweep in which Guyana’s “Third Worldism” and Jonestown are parts of the same continuum—a rebellion against the old order doomed by the corruption and ineptitude of their leaders and the fantasies of their disciples. He sees the same phenomenon taking place in Trinidad, leading it down an inexorable path of decay and failure. (He was not correct: Despite its problems, Trinidad remains a stable parliamentary democracy and is considerably richer than when he was writing.)

The problem with trying to tie Jonestown to Guyanese culture is that the vast majority of Guyanese had no idea the place existed, learning of it through the same global headlines as the rest of the world. Naipaul himself meets only one person who ever visited the settlement. It was an isolated U.S. outpost, with no Guyanese on site, whose members rarely left except for short shopping trips.

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The second half of the book moves to California, where Naipaul pontificates on U.S. radicalism, the civil rights movement, and the ways in which Jones was able to use them as cover. The Peoples Temple was embraced by many San Francisco politicians, from Willie Brown to Harvey Milk, who should have known better, but who bought into Jones’ claim to be a Christian socialist fighting for the downtrodden.

Naipaul’s version of everything he sees in the state is sour, one long sneer at vegetarians, environmentalism, hippies, feminists (who insist on a “febrile concern for sexism”), new religions, students, and so forth. Compassion is doled out in tiny portions: Even the survivors of Jonestown are blamed for not having faced up to their own responsibility for disaster.

In an era where health cults and patriarchal leaders have taken over the U.S. government, the fevered atmosphere of 1970s California and the monsters it spawned might be worth revisiting. Indeed, this has already been fertile material in the hands of contemporary writers who understand Californian politics and culture, such as Bryan Burrough or David Talbot. Jeff Guinn’s 2017 The Road to Jonestown is a masterclass of deep reportage and empathy, unpicking the different threads of a story that ended with mothers being forced at gunpoint to poison their babies. But Naipaul didn’t have the chops to do the work; he was too busy being contemptuous of California to make any attempt to get inside it.

Reissues are fine things, and I hope Doubleday continues this series. Journey to Nowhere, however, can be safely shoved in the box of justly forgotten books.