Read it in Books:The Kingdom of This World.

"In overthrowing me, you have cut only the trunk of the tree of liberty. It will spring again from the roots, for they are numerous and deep" - Toussaint L'Ouverture.

"Koupe tet, boule kay" ("Cut heads. Burn houses") - Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

I'm always embarking on harebrained schemes. Some work out (TADS, the London LOOP, Offa's Dyke, starting this blog even). Others, usually those relating to making money or affairs of the heart, prove less successful . Then there's a third category:- plans that have been shelved - but not permanently.

I eventually did listen to every album David Bowie ever recorded and I was most fastidious when it came to compiling my list of my 100 favourite Fall songs but I've certainly dragged my heels with two other projects, both of a literary nature and both of which came to me when perusing the many bookstores of Hay-on-Wye during that Offa's Dyke adventure.

I'd decided that I'd make two thorough studies into two different genres that interested me. To start my journey into the world of Southern Gothic I'd purchased two William Faulkner novels (which, to my shame, I've barely looked at. I didn't actually get round to even purchasing my first book in my planned investigation of Magic (or Magical) Realism until at least three years later. In fact I finally bought Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World, written 1949, on my 48th birthday. From the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco.

I have great memories of that day but, until now, I'd not made much headway with the book. To be frank, brief glances had scared me off. It looks pretty bloody tricky. I'm no expert on the Haitian revolution of 1803 or the following reign of King Henri Christophe and I wasn't sure if reading an account through the eyes of a fictional elderly slave, Ti Noel, that took in Vodou ceremonies, snake gods, and animal magic (nothing to do with Johnny Morris) would make events much clearer for me.

The promise of "an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, madness, and erotomania", however, coaxed me back in. Carpentier was born, of a Russian mother and a French father, in Cuba 1904 and, after a spell living in Europe, moved back there following the revolution. He died in Paris in 1980. Although my Spanish is passable it's not good enough to attempt a book like this so I was reading a translation by the fantastically named Edwidge Danticat.

Danticat's forerword took in Haitian history from a 2004 perspective. The year Haiti observed two hundred years of independence and the year Haitians battled over whether or not controversial president Jean-Bertrand Aristide should remain in power. This foreword alone takes in Toussaint L'Ouverture, chimeras, jets to the Central African Republic, the Haitian Act of Independence being written on a parchment made from a former white master's skin (and using his skull as an inkwell), and a one armed slave who turns into an insect in order to escape execution. I was entering a very different world.

A world that began with an account of twenty stallions being imported into Cap Francais (now Cap-Haitien) from Normandy. Ti Noel was unable, like most slaves, to read but he had a gift for 'judging horse flesh'. Fellow slave, Macandal (from Sierra Leone) had an even more remarkable talent. He could metamorphosise into a dog, a lizard, a gannet, a centipede, a tarantula, or a moth. His strange powers caused a 'negress' to give birth to a child with a wild boar's face which, when one considers that he had "testicles like rocks", is quite an achievement.

Carpentier paints a picture of Haiti that is all tripe shops, plantations, French newspapers, carob trees, fandangos danced to the rhythm of castanets, and monkeys in Spanish dress. That, of course, is just the backdrop. Not just to this tale of a slave rebellion but Carpentier's wonderful flights of fancy and literary inventiveness. Poisons brewed in caves and bulls having their throats slit so their blood can be added to mortar to make a fortress impregnable will paint a vivid enough picture for you/

There are political and racial aspects underpinning the story, at one point it is decreed that any person with even one eighth negro descent should be put to death, but they are highly camouflaged beneath Carpentier's phantasmagorical visions and literary flights of fancy. I certainly struggled to ascertain what he was trying to say on that score.

There is often quietly considered gore and horror. Macandal's arm is rudimentally amputated following an accident at an upturned trough, women are raped by large felines, escaped slaves are tortured as an example to others, and entire families are decimated by a mysterious poison.

Elsewhere a cargo of venomous snakes is loosed upon peasants that aid runaway slaves, a man carries a red phallus on a crutch to summon his God, and yet another converts himself into a wasp but soon tires of "the monotonous geometry of wax constructions".

If the horror doesn't have you turning away from the book you may have to do so anyway. To consult a dictionary. There were so many words in this book I had to look up that I made a list:- alexandrine, antiphony, asafetida, buskin, caladium, canebrake, carboy, ceiba, crupper, culverin, dentelated, esparto, galloon, girandole, glaucous, griffe, haymow, hemistich, houmfort, houngan, immure, ipecac, jalousie, lazzaroni, loge, louver, monstrance, octoroon, ogival, orgeat, percheron, porgy, quadroon, quebracho, rapine, rigadoon, rogation, sacatra, scapular, shako, socle, subchanter, thurible, and tuberose.

So, some of the words I had to look up but did I understand the book? Apart from the bits that were in Latin? On many occasions I wasn't quite certain what was going or who was who but I got the general feel. It seemed like a book in which you immersed yourself in the author's world rather than one in which you follow a strict narrative. Even for what I imagine magic(al) realism to be it seemed very loose, if very short.

I can't say I totally enjoyed it - but, at the same time it wasn't an unpleasant experience (despite all the bloodletting). It felt good to finally dip my toes into the water of this genre and hopefully, all being well, I'll be back for a proper swim in it soon.

In the meantime I suppose I am, like all men, guilty of hoping for too much reward for too little investment. As Carpentier writes towards the end of The Kingdom of This World:- "A man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him".