sweet

 

A SWEET SCENT OF DEATH

Guillermo Arriaga

Faber & Faber, £9.99 £7.99 pbk

Reviewed by Mick Herron


In a Mexican village, a young girl is found murdered; a girl new to Loma Grande, unknown to most of the locals, but admired from afar by sixteen-year-old Ramon Castanos, who covers her body with his shirt. Which is all it takes to establish the "fact", in the eyes of his neighbours, that she was "Ramon Castanos' girl", and "the phrase was repeated so often by so many mouths that he finally accepted it as true." But with this new romantic reputation comes certain responsibilities, chief among them the need to avenge the death. Arriaga's novel, then, a translation from the Spanish, isn't a mystery story, or at least, its central mysteries remain unsolved; nor is it a thriller-in a sense, it's an anti-thriller, denoting as it does the inevitability of certain actions. By becoming Adela's lover, even if only in imagination, Ramon is left with no choice but to seek revenge upon "The Gypsy", swiftly cast by rumour as the villain: a man who has already survived five machete swipes and three bullets in the chest in previous encounters with cuckolded husbands. The ironies are written stark and clear: the reader is never left in any doubt that The Gypsy is innocent, and it is another love affair that brings him back to Loma Grande to seal his own or Ramon's fate. It's a good book, this; written in an uncluttered prose that matches up to its big subjects: love, death and tragedy. Not what I'd call a genre novel, though; more of a distant cousin to Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold.