Tangled Web UK Review November 2000
The Tatooed Soldier by
Hector Tobar
pbk out June 00
(Serpents Tail)
at £8.99
For Antonio Bernal, defeated and homeless in Los Angeles, there are only
two types of people. There are those who walked about the city like
well-fed children, bathed in the glow of innocence, the happy haze of
the unknowing. Then there are those in whose gaze he senses a truth,
painful and unspoken, an old memory stored away and hidden with great
care.
Héctor Tobar speaks for the second group. For Antonio’s devastating
memory is his discovery, back in his native Guatemala, of the mutilated
bodies of Elena, his young wife, and their first-born, slaughtered by a
death squad – and his own humiliation when one of the perpetrators is
pointed out to him, but he cannot bring himself to revenge them. Then,
one day in Los Angeles’ Macarthur Park (but light years from the world
of Jimmy Webb), he spots on the arm of a chess player the jaguar tattoo
that marks a member of an elite squad of the Guatemalan Army. And the
face is the one that Antonio remembers from his nightmare, years before.
Héctor Tobar’s multi-faceted first novel is about revenge, retribution
and rehabilitation. Beautifully structured, interlaced with flashbacks
alternatively revelatory, lyrical and horrific, Tobar carefully builds
two memorable portraits. The first is of Antonio himself, the caring,
shy young intellectual, his relationship with the idealistic, impulsive
Elena and his life amongst the cardboard ghettos of L.A.’s ethnic
dispossessed.
But it is the tattooed soldier himself, Guillermo Longoria, that we
come to know best. From a peasant family, put to work in the fields from
age five, he is forced as a seventeen year-old into the Guatemalan Army,
plucked from a suburban cinema where he has gone to see ET. Later we
see the army giving him a future, a shape and an order in his life that
he has never before experienced, but at a huge cost – his humanity. But
there is no easy condemnation here, only many-shaded characterisation of
a high order.
There is a third portrait too – of Los Angeles from the wrong side of
the tracks. Tobar, Guatemalan himself, was part of the team from the Los
Angeles Times that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1992
riots, set in motion by the verdict in the trial of the policemen who so
viciously attacked Rodney King. The climax to the book takes place
against this backdrop, the rioters and looters seen from several points
of view. For the looters, for example, it is a day without
submissiveness, a day with some small compensation for the indignities
of their daily lives. Longoria, by contrast, notes the poor discipline
of the Latin gangs and the ill-advised tactics of both police and US
Army.
Great fiction,clear-eyed but compassionate, gripping and moving. Don’t
miss it.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
