BOOK REVIEW / Forbidden fruit of black on white: The longest memory - by Fred D'Aguiar: Chatto pounds 9.99

THIS IS a gripping lyric exploration of the life of Whitechapel, a slave on an 18th-century Virginian plantation. In 13 short chapters, different voices evoke his childhood, personality, love, parentage, his longing to learn from his own experience, his doomed hope of 'writing verses for a living', and the 200 lashes that kill him.

These voices are sharply distinct, yet the novel has a lovely even texture, focused by two images: knot and pot. Centuries of slave-master relations clench like bindweed under the plantation's ground: a moral tangle where owners deceive themselves through the white sepulchre of Christianity. (Contrast the real, clarified integrity of Whitechapel, the ancient slave.) 'The only solution is continue with this woven complexity and behave responsibly, or discard the entire fabric and begin again. Down that road lies chaos.' But the white knot is the chaos: 'I told my son we are different from slaves in intelligence and human standing before God. He asks why Whitechapel could do a knot I couldn't do. His first joke. Not a bad one . . .'

The deeper bond, the longest memory is the cooking-pot, Africa. But Whitechapel tells his granddaughter: 'Africa is not for you. Make your dreams here.' Chapel dreams of the difficult north, where black can meet white, in marriage and print. His mother rejoices in 'the clarity of his voice as he lifts word after word from the pages of a book'. Her son 'can open a book and sound like the master. I stare at the pot and smile.'

D'Aguiar's book, the Guyana-born poet's first novel, is about this clarity, about the right to write, to marry black to white. The issues, carried by simple physical details, are crystal clear, with a poet's accuracy. So are the voices: girl in love, mother, father, frustrated landowner, compromised overseer. The core is the danger of wanting the best for people. Chapel dies on the one plantation whose owner advocates kindness to slaves, betrayed by the man who loves him most.

The novel earns its heartbreak by its density of moral thought, compacted in the black pastoral of an unvirginal Virginia. The white girl teaches Chapel to read and falls in love with him. His literacy and her eros are revealed at the same Dantean moment, Romeo and Juliet falling to the floor. They meet back to back in the dark. He is forbidden to read: she recites to him. 'My back becomes a thousand fingertips feeling his breathing.'

The novel's centre of hope is this union of sex and the remembered word: 'We spend our nights apart, watching the sky for the clarity we know will bring us together.' Lyric optimism from rottenness and violence: a brilliant - and beautiful - achievement.

(Photograph omitted)