Jim Jones was an American cult leader who carried himself like Elvis and variously claimed to be the reincarnation of Lenin, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama. The Peoples Temple, the movement he founded in 1955, was his stage; America’s underclass his fanbase. Charismatic and controlling, Jones dreamed of establishing a Marxist utopia, first in the forgiving climate of 1960s California and then at a ramshackle agricultural project in the jungles of Guyana. But he ventured too far up-river, dosed himself on barbiturates and spiralled towards demagoguery. This silver-tongued advocate for social justice and racial equality is now best remembered for instigating the mass murder-suicide of 918 cult members, 304 of them children. Until the events of 9/11, the 1978 Jonestown massacre represented the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life.
Four decades on, Australian author Laura Elizabeth Woollett has interviewed the survivors for a supple, punchy debut novel – an apocalyptic eve-of-destruction saga that paints a vivid portrait of life inside the Peoples Temple. Its focus on Jones’s besotted, compromised handmaidens builds on themes explored in Woollett’s 2016 short-story collection The Love of a Bad Man (which folded Jones in with Hitler, Ian Brady and Clyde Barrow). But Beautiful Revolutionary also takes its place in a burgeoning subgenre of fact-based tales of self-styled messiahs, bunking alongside Emma Cline’s The Girls (Charles Manson), Netflix’s Wild Wild Country (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) and Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Manson again). How to explain the popularity of these fevered tales of tribalism, gaslighting and mounting paranoia? Beautiful Revolutionary’s dark history sits securely in the past, isolated and quarantined, like a virus on a microscope slide. But it implicitly nods towards more recent convulsions.
Jones, no surprise, lolls at the story’s centre. He’s an expert bamboozler, stylised to the hilt with his jet-black hair and painted sideburns, his eyes permanently hidden behind rock-star shades. Tellingly, though, the novel is more interested in a handful of thinly fictionalised supporting players; the seekers and suckers who spun in his orbit and formed the Temple’s inner circle. While Jones preaches racial integration to his majority-black membership, his leadership group is almost exclusively white. It’s an early indication – assuming one were needed – that this bold revolutionary mission might not have all of its ducks in a row.
“I’m too damn loving,” Jones laments at one point, which is another way of saying that he demands his flock love him back, refer to him as “Father” and hang upon his every word. He casts an instant spell on Evelyn (based on Carolyn Moore Layton), who is reeling from the upheavals of the late 1960s (the murder of Bobby Kennedy, “the sweeping blood tide of ugliness”) and hungering for a saviour. Jones takes her to bed and lavishes her with orgasms, thereby ending her marriage to placid Lenny Lynden. But he’s also a man who prides himself on caring for the downtrodden and abused. So he provides Lenny with a hand-picked new partner and ensures that his own invalid wife (long-suffering Rosaline) remains at his side. Jones’s love takes many forms. Happily it seems there is more than enough to go around.
Woollett’s historical drama has a hysterical edge. The 60s references pile up thick and fast (Barbarella, Sharon Tate, “Hey Jude”, Country Joe), like bumper stickers slapped on a VW Beetle. The protagonists are so at the mercy of their puppet-master that their decisions lack coherence; they could be second-rate actors on the set of some demented daytime soap. For all its narrative turnabouts and spasms of self-questioning, this is a novel of incident not psychology. A more experienced author might have scrutinised the relationships more deeply, unpicking the ties that bound the father to his flock. Or would that have turned out to be a fool’s errand? Beautiful Revolutionary suggests that the cult members are victims of Jones because they are victims of the time, swept up in the moment, fired by the rhetoric of revolution. The countercultural ground-fog has made them all lose their bearings.
We know from the start there’s no redemption for these people. November 1978 draws closer every chapter. Once out at Jonestown, the pace tightens and the plot constricts. It’s here that Lenny’s footloose second wife takes on the role of Judas, while the Temple’s kindly father morphs into Mr Kurtz. The taps spew brown water, the air is thick with mosquitoes and the workers sing slave spirituals as they cut the sugar cane. Belatedly the cult members appear to have twigged that there isn’t much difference between the agricultural project and a Mississippi plantation. But they’ve come too far and are in too deep. The only escape they can think of is the one Jones provides. They’re like saucer-eyed schoolgirls in the grip of a mass psychogenic illness, or a flock of sheep in a blizzard drifting towards the cliff edge.
• Xan Brooks’s The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times is published by Salt. Beautiful Revolutionary is published by Scribe (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
