Death in the land of boundless bloodlust

PERU is divided into three distinct regions. There is the coastal desert, the jungle and the mountains; each existing in what appear to be separate historical zones, each with its own language.

These concentrations despise each other. There is a definite hierarchy comprising religion and mythology, where the mountain people leave offerings of food by caves and gulleys to appease the animal spirits who live in the earth and the cultivated citizens of Lima consider them little more than animals. The mountain people think even less of the Indians.

There is a continual quest for comprehension. People misunderstand what is being said, ask their informants to repeat themselves, barely speak their language, or can make little sense of the details they have been given. The novel opens with such an encounter. ``I'll never figure out what's happening here,'' says Corporal Lituma the policeman leading the investigations at the heart of this novel, and there may well be readers who find themselves sympathising with his sentiments.

Vargas Llosa is an elliptical storyteller who masks his ingenuity with skill that sometimes resembles facility. He has always been good at dialogue, at pinning and exploiting masculine overtones in certain types of speech. His confrontations bristle with possibilities. Yet the best of his work takes us behind the speech and into the undertones revealing what the narrators would not want divulged, the fears and anxieties, the sexual repression and terror implicit in their bravado.

What gives the dialogue its edge is the way speeches simmering with fear and misunderstanding are intercut with terrorist outrages, with scenes of often unbearable pointless horror told with journalistic, matter-of-fact detachment. It is a process of accumulation and as one outrage is piled on the others the initial anger and disbelief gives way to acceptance rather as it must be for the Peruvians, or the way continual images of shortage emulsifies concern.

The disappearance of three men from a highway construction camp is being investigated by Corporal Lituma whom we have watched rise through the ranks in Vargas Llosa novels. He is aided by Tomas Carreno ``a man without guile, though somewhat given to melancholy'', a man out of place in the mountains whom the corporal thinks should have been born on the coast. The isolation of the Naccos camp is chilling. It has a cinematic immediacy around a stockade, where icy wind rattles the cabins, avalanches tumble intermittently and thunder and lightning are almost continuous accompaniment to the pathetic contact with the outside world, maintained by a crackling radio.

At first it seems the victims have been murdered, or have joined the terrorists, then the policemen suspect the Sandero militia as something more sinister emerges: reports that a local couple dabble in witchcraft surface with allegations of Dionysian rituals, cannibalism and sacrifice. There is a bloodlust that seems boundless, without restraint. The guerrilla's pointless murder of European tourists for no reason other than their unfamiliarity is shown to have a deeper significance, reflected in the Indians' assassination of gringos, whom they believe are vampires. They disembowel them, suck their fat, smoke their flesh and eat it.

Fairly soon, a greater tragedy becomes obvious, a greater bloodlust, a greater disaster which engulfs the entire country and is the affliction of Peru itself. The time shifts and dialogue, the combined narratives, stories within stories, the quest for understanding and continual dislocation reflect the chaos of the country.

And in the end we do not know the source of the mystery. No bodies are discovered, though a drunken witness emerges with an unreliable testimony. Here too, no one is innocent: even the investigators are implicated.

This intricate and challenging novel is difficult to assess without superlatives. It is unforgettable and terrifying, with a power and dignity that transcends its subjects. Vargas Llosa is now in exile, but he is clearly haunted by his country's horrifying splendour. This response is among his most memorable achievements.