Time and inattention have softened his image. The mass-murdering buffoon Idi Amin died not long ago after twenty-four years of cosseted asylum in Libya and then Saudi Arabia, where his devotion to Islam was obviously felt to outweigh his crimes against humanity. (We are given Tolstoyan access to just about everybody’s thoughts and feelings.) And finally, the reader should be prepared for afterthoughts-I had them, and they appear below-on the literary approach to evil in general, and in particular the drawbacks involved in a near-parodic, or hyperbolic, literary approach of the kind Isegawa employs.

It challenges the reader to interpret and assess, without reflexive impatience or indictment, the consciousnesses on display in the story. It raises questions about the protocols an author should observe in fictionalizing historical fact. It leaves the reader with an overload of brutal images. This is a grim book, disquieting in many ways. They spend their lives in an impossibly extreme setting and their individual fates enact instructive variations on the consequences of passivity and careless complicity in the face of established evil. The characters with whom the novel is concerned make up an advantaged group-they are well educated and well connected socially. It is more a study in ethical blankness than it is of active, absolute evil. “Snakepit” is right! Moses Isegawa, author of Abyssinian Chronicles (1998), has set his strong new novel in Uganda between 19, the precise period of Idi Amin Dada’s ghastly reign of terror in that country.

Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa