Deep in Guyana's rainforest, a colonial plantation owner named Donne drives a multiracial crew up a treacherous river, hunting for the Amerindian laborers who fled his cruelty. His brother narrates from a dream that opens with Donne's own death—the first unsettling note in a journey that only grows stranger.
Rulers and those who hope to rule both treat admitting they could be wrong as a heresy. So fallibility is quickly pushed aside in favour of hubris. The pride, or a sophisticated show of confidence, covers up a paranoid anxiety underneath.
People who recognise themselves in each other's misery can draw a strange confidence from it. They bask in a common degradation they have long been used to, and they mistake it for neighbourly fellowship. The comfort is real, but it is a wishful one and it renews nothing.
A group held together by command does not stay neatly split into masters and servants. The control itself becomes a web that ties everyone to everyone else. Inside it, people grow perverse, cruel and exploitative toward one another, and none of them can break free.
A journey to take over a land and its people is never the first of its kind. Every new expedition reenacts the earlier invasions and the failed meetings with the people already living there. It continues an exploitation of land and people that keeps repeating, and those on the journey may suddenly feel they are living out an earlier trip into the interior.
When people are bound closely together, each starts to find himself mirrored in the others. The sense of a single, separate self breaks apart. You end up seeing yourself everywhere except where you thought you stood, and one person's inner death shows up as another's slackening will.