Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord

Synopsis: Dionisio Vivo, a South American lecturer in philosphy, is puzzled by the hideously mutilated corpses that keep turning up outside his front door. To his friend, Ramon, one of the few honest policement in town, the message is all too clear: Dionisio's letters to the press, exposing the drug barons, must stop; and although Dionisio manages to escape the hit-men sent to get him, he soon realises that others are more vulnerable, and his love for them leads him to take a colossal revenge.

Review: Goodness gracious me, this was a torrid, surreal, and at times harrowing, read. I knew I was in for something different when the first paragraph read ...

'Ever since his young wife had given birth to a cat as an unexpected consequence of his experiments in sexual alchemy, and ever since his accidental invention of a novel explosive that confounded Newtonian physics by loosing its force at the precise distance of 6.56 feet from the source of its blast, President Veracruz had thought of himself not only as an adept but also as an intellectual. His speeches became peppered with obscure and recondite quotations from Paracelsus and Basil Valentine; he joined the Rosicrucians, considering himself to be a worthy successor to Doctor John Dee, Hermes Trismegistus, Sir Francis Bacon, Christian Rosencreuz, and Éliphas Levi. He gave up reading his wife's women's magazines, from which he had previously derived most of his opinions, and took up reading La Prensa .'

The book tells the story of Dionisio Vivo, who is annoyed but unworried, when he finds his front lawn repeatedly littered with grotesquely disfigured, dead bodies. His friend, the local policeman Ramon, tries to tell Dionisio that these killings are warnings, sent because of Dionisio's regular letters to the press condemning the local drug barons and criticising the corrupt government. Dionisio however, refuses to be frightened or to believe that the two things are in any way connected and he continues to go on with his life as before. Well, almost as before, he has in fact fallen in love with the beautiful Anica and is determined to settle down and shape up (in other words he has to give up his frequent visits to the town prostitutes.)

There are desperate and repeated attempts on his life but inexplicably they all fail and his enemies, plus the local townspeople, begin to believe that he is in fact a 'brujo' ... a magical being who is kept free from harm by the spirits. The hit men are advised to target his loved ones instead with terrifying and far reaching consequences. For a book that's so steeped in violence it's surprisingly funny. The thugs are often bumblingly stupid and there's an element of farce in their early assassination attempts but just as you begin to get accustomed to the almost cartoonish violence things take a sickening turn. At times I found it very, very reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there's a mix here of humour, lust and violence which is very like the writing in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' especially when you add in the huge dollop of magical realism that weaves through both.

Obviously de Bernieres is keen to expose the evils of drug trafficking and he manages to get his point across here loud and clear without it seeming at all preachy or sanctimonious. I've only just learnt that this book is the central one of a trilogy .. I didn't know this as it was lent to me but I thought the story stood by itself anyway. Perhaps it would have been less confusing at the start if I had read 'The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts' ... it did take me a few chapters to get the feel of the writing but the story grips you within no time (literally by the throat.)

Like Marquez, de Bernieres's tale is full of red blooded males, hot blooded women, tarts with hearts, slow witted thugs, calculating evildoers and ridiculous despots.
There is plenty to make you blush and if you don't like sex in novels then this one definitely isn't for you. There's violence too in abundance .. including a particularly harrowing scene near the end which I couldn't actually make it through. Somehow the humour still comes through and so does the magical, mystical elements.

Action packed and absurdly funny but not for the faint hearted.