Leonard Woolf arrived in Sri Lanka in 1904, fresh out of Cambridge. During his time on the island, Woolf rose from a cadet to the rank of the Assistant Government Agent of Hambantota in the Southern Province. Nothing was more predictable than his decision to write a novel about Ceylon, as the country was known under British rule. From police officers to district magistrates, colonial administrators made sense of their stints in the colonies by churning out memoirs and fiction.

Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913), however, unexpectedly insists on making visible the lives of the British empire’s seemingly most insignificant subjects. It is an ethnographic study hiding inside a thriller.

The plot—this was Woolf’s first novel, after all—has all the trappings of a revenge melodrama. It tracks the story of Silindu, a Sinhalese peasant struggling to make ends meet in the fictional village of Beddagama. He’s being harassed by two local officials, native emissaries of the British empire. They extort him for money and demand sexual favors from his daughter. For most of the novel, Silindu is overwhelmed by the precarity of his situation, unable to come to an effective solution to his problems. That is, until he finally shoots them both dead.

Silindu’s violent disintegration is enmeshed within the minute details of everyday life in the village. Readers learn about the rhythms of farming, local kinship practices, and religious rituals—and how imperial bureaucracy has insinuated itself into every aspect of existence. Like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) nearly half a century later, The Village in the Jungle portrays a society reeling in response to the pressures of colonial power.

The novel starts with, and stays with, the jungle. In a letter to his friend Lytton Strachey, Woolf waxed poetic about the sublime beauty of Sri Lanka: “I went for a walk the other night by the side of the lagoon at sunset; the beauty of it was supreme with the bright green of the paddy fields, the masses of palms, the sky every shade of red & yellow, & the sea every shade of blue.” That sort of picture-postcard landscape does not appear in The Village in the Jungle. Instead, the first eight pages present an unbroken description of a surreal, apocalyptic hinterland:

The trees are stunted and twisted by the drought, by the thin and sandy soil, by the dry wind … And there are enormous cactuses, evil-looking and obscene, with their great fleshy green slabs, which put out immense needle-like spines. More evil-looking still are the great leafless trees, which look like a tangle of gigantic spiders’ legs—smooth, bright green, jointed together—from which, when they are broken, oozes out a milky, viscous fluid.

This is a landscape emptied of human existence. The only traces of people we see in the first few pages of the novel are the bones of a man who foolishly ventured into the jungle alone. They have been “gnawed by the wild pig and the jackal, and crushed and broken by the trampling of elephants.”

The jungle is meant to confuse and terrify the novel’s characters and its readers. Woolf was familiar with Conrad’s work, and many landscape passages eerily recall Conrad’s descriptions of the Belgian Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899). As in Conrad, even when characters think they understand the dynamics of Woolf’s jungle, they really don’t. Silindu is the only person who truly claims to “know” the jungle. Yet even he finds little solace in it. Knowing the jungle means acknowledging its inhospitable, disorienting properties.

The jungle is in constant conflict with the villages on its outskirts. In the preface to the 1926 edition of The Village in the Jungle, Woolf described touring his district and coming across evidence of villages that had been eroded away:

The stump of some palm tree by the side of a mound where a hut had stood, and near it, if you searched, a depression in the ground which had once been the village tank. And some old man in your party would tell you that there had once been the village of Dehigama, or Bogama, or Beddegama, and that perhaps his own father had come from it. It had now returned to the jungle.

The fictional Beddagama meets a similar fate at the end of the novel, vanishing into the jungle without a trace. The only certainty that the jungle promises is extermination. It presses in on villages, surrounds them, hangs over them, and blots them out. Ultimately, the threat of the jungle is erasure from the historical record.

Near the end of the novel, Silindu gains an audience with a British magistrate, the only white character in the novel. He confesses to the murders, detailing the systematic abuse he’s faced. That magistrate, whose name we never learn, is struck by the moral illogic of Silindu’s anticipated jail sentence. Pondering what motivated Silindu, the magistrate correctly intuits that “he only wanted to be left alone. It must take a lot of cornering and torturing and shooting to rouse a man like that.”

Woolf’s account of the crumbling of political institutions and the imperial disregard of silenced subalterns proved prescient of happenings on the other side of the world as well.

The magistrate is trying to get at an unanswerable question: What and who is culpable for Silindu’s disintegration? Is it the conniving officials acting on behalf of the British empire? The harshness of peasant life on the periphery of the jungle? The systemic exploitations of the colonial system?

The Village in the Jungle isn’t really about the equivocating magistrate, who occupies very little narrative space. Making him a marginal character reflects a broader historical reality. British colonial administrators wielded immense power, but in practice, were utterly removed from the daily lives of their colonial subjects. Instead, British rule relied on a complex network of intermediaries. In the novel, Silindu’s tribulations lead him through tiers of officials employed by the imperial bureaucracy, drawn from the local population.

Reaching the very top of this pyramid held out to colonial subjects the false promise of fair redress. Silindu discovers that working one’s way up the chain of command is a never-ending task. Access to the British official at the top (think of that Kafka parable, “Before the Law”) is heavily gated: “there are always peons and clerks and headmen in the way before you can get to him.”

It’s appropriate, then, that our colonial administrator, absent for most of the novel, bursts onto the scene only in its final pages, makes some grand moral and legal pronouncements, and leaves. The magistrate is portrayed as unusually sensitive to Silindu’s predicament. Yet, despite his bold proclamations—“I shouldn’t like to hang Silindu of Beddagama for killing your rascally headman”—he sees himself bound by the directives of the colonial legal system. When Silindu meets him face-to-face, the dire outcome has already been determined by his clashes with the minor government officials. The administrator may be the most powerful person Silindu will ever meet, yet he is ultimately entirely superfluous to Silindu’s fate.

The Village in the Jungle is about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. When Silindu briefly considers running away after the murders, he imagines hiding himself away in some cave, eating what he can forage and catch. But the jungle provides no romanticized refuge from empire. Silindu concludes that his fate would be the same as that of the carcass that readers glimpsed in the very first pages of the novel. Caught between the harsh novelty of colonial rule and the unwelcoming jungle, Silindu is trapped in a fatalistic universe from which there is no respite.

Woolf became increasingly disenchanted with Britain’s imperial mission and filled with ugly feelings about his own role in it. He began to write The Village in the Jungle in 1911, finally quitting the civil service in 1912. By 1914, Woolf’s account of the crumbling of political institutions and the imperial disregard of silenced subalterns proved prescient of happenings on the other side of the world as well.