Narrated in the third person, Beautiful Revolutionary shifts artfully between the fictionalised perspectives of Evelyn, Rosaline, Evelyn’s soon-to-be ex-husband Lenny Lynden, Gene Luce (a Temple member since its foundation in Indianapolis in the 1950s), and other characters more or less close to Jones and his inner circle. These perspectival shifts have an unexpected effect. Although Temple life is never directly narrated from Jones’s point of view, although his stories of ‘[h]ow America will set fire to itself, mushroom clouds over every major city’ are related at a remove from the man himself, and although we never see from within his visions of ‘karmic retribution’ for an escalating number of ‘enemies’, Jones nevertheless emerges as the novel’s most well-rounded character.

Perhaps this is because there are no perspectives in the narrative that are properly external to the Peoples Temple. Any wider context is limited to the book’s opening and closing pages: before newlyweds Evelyn and Lenny join the Temple in Evergreen Valley, California, and after the US media reports of ‘starvation, sleep deprivation, public beatings and illegal weaponry’ that spark calls for Jonestown to be investigated and lead to the Congressman’s visit. The insularity of Beautiful Revolutionary lends it an atmosphere of cloying claustrophobia that is appropriate to the representation of cult life. Jones is the central ordering presence – ‘Father’ to all his congregation – including those who eventually defect. For Rosaline, it is Jones’s ‘genius and his cruelty, that he doesn’t follow other men’s rules; makes up his own rules’, and polices the behaviour of his congregation accordingly.

Nevertheless, one of the challenges of representing such a community, especially when doing so from the perspective of the faithful, is to convince a contemporary reader of the charismatic power of a man like Jones. If we can suspend our disbelief enough to have faith in Jones’s magnetic appeal, perhaps we can also work towards an understanding of how, and why, apparently intelligent individuals willingly endured isolation from non-Temple family and friends, ritualised public humiliation, rape, forced labour, and even death at Jones’s hands. Woollett’s novel is brimming with historical detail and her depiction of Jonestown is impressive, but Jones is presented as a comically flawed character, even from the point of view of those who will give their lives for him. This makes his baleful power over them difficult to fathom.

Jim Jones at an anti-eviction rally in Manilatown, January 16, 1977. (Photograph by Nancy Wong)

Throughout the novel, the faithful consciously work to prop up Jones, to provide the ballast he needs to give the illusion of a god-like power. They ‘pick through new members’ trash cans for anything Father might use during his predictions’, when he appears to read the minds of his followers. They prepare the chicken gizzards that Jones slips ‘into some poor old sister’s mouth … to be choked up and passed off as cancers’ in one of his public ‘healings’. They stage an attempted assassination and a series of bomb threats, grist for the mill of his increasing paranoia, evidence of his many enemies. And they do all of this for the good of the socialist group as defined by Jones. Of the gizzards, Rosaline says: ‘I know it feels like dirty work, but we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for the greater good. … Lotsa these folks wouldn’t come all this way if it wasn’t for the healings.’

Laura Elizabeth WoollettFrom within the Temple, it may have seemed better to foster the illusion of Jones’s power than to risk a crisis of faith in his vision of a socialist utopia. Certainly, the need to believe in some higher cause is a more persuasive motivator than some of the others suggested in the novel: for instance, that Jones ‘is a minister’ and Evelyn ‘is a minister’s daughter’ who loved her father ‘too much’; that, for Gene Luce, ‘the universe made sense’ when Jones ‘put his hand on [his] crotch’ and ‘fucked him against that wallpaper’; and that, for Jones ‘the sex plane is sickening … but I will sacrifice my body over and over, if that’s what it takes to bring you people to enlightenment’. All of which contributes to a portrait of Jones but fails somehow to do justice to the people who followed him.

The publication of Beautiful Revolutionary marks the fortieth anniversary of the massacre. A well-written account, it raises important questions about the desire for faith, especially in a time of crisis, and the dangerous appeal of a powerful personality dressed up as a revolutionary.