Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo

Religion, ritual, corruption, murder and terror are woven into the fabric of Red April as vividly as the blankets tourists bring home from Peru. It is Carnival week, May 2000, and party-goer Justino Mayta Carazo discovers a body, badly burned and missing its right arm. Like everyone else in Ayachuco he has been drinking for several days and his memories are vague.

Justino's testimony is recorded in amusing officialese, by Associate District ProsecutorFelix Chacaltana Saldivar, a devoted bureaucrat, who lives alone, except for the heavy and present presence of his dead mother.

As he has done 36 times before, he has just completed a doomed supply requisition for a new typewriter, two pencils and a ream of carbon paper. On the way to work he stops to buy a newspaper.

The vendor said that today's edition hadn't arrived in Ayacucho yet, but he did have yesterday's. Chacaltana bought it. Nothing can change much from one day to the next, he thought, all days are basically the same.

 Of course, however hard the diligent prosecutor tries to follow the rules, and simply do his job, the coming days will not be the same. Even his trips to the restaurant, where the enchanting girl in the pink embroidered blouse works, where he wants to drink mate, will change.

"Today we only have coffee."

"Coffee would be fine."

"Coffee with guineapig? You're very strange, Senor...."

The shadow of Shining Path terror hangs heavy over Ayachuco. It is a decade since the war subsided, but scars are deep and fears that the Senderistas will return are visceral and ripe for exploitation by army, police, politician and anyone else trying to win advantage in fragile times.

As the police captain tells Chacaltana,"I don't want to know what evidence you have. I don't want to have anything to do with this case. Elections are round the corner. Nobody wants to hear about terrorists in Ayacucho."  

Puzzled, the dutiful prosector says it is their duty.

"Our duty is to shut up and do what we're told!"

But Chacaltana continues to investigate in his leaden, jobsworth way. He continues as the Carnival goes on, and the death toll mounts. The killings are linked by a sequence of severed limbs ... and the immediate presence of Chacaltana. The inquiries bring brutal interrogations, where people disappear and mass graves are just part of the horrific landscape of terror and counter-terror, where morality was long since dissolved by frightened pragmatism.

"I was once like you, Chacaltana I hought we could stop this. But it's stronger than the two of us. This is the history of our country. Spare yourself the dispoointment."

Santiago Roncagliolo has written a wonderful novel that works well a crime story, but is layered with vivid insights on so many levels, at once funny, gripping  and shocking. Some of the events are brutal, but there is no glorification of violence here, simply the unnerving presence of a terrible reality. As the author notes:

The Senderista methods of attack described in this book, as well as the countersubversive strategies of investigation, torture and disappearance are real. Many of the dialogues of the characters are in fact citations taken from Senderista documents or the statements of terrorists, officials, and members of the armed forces who participated in the conflict. 

• Red April, by Santiago Roncagliolo (Kindle edition), trans. Edith Grossman  

Comments

[Bernadette]

Great review, I am very tempted to read it now though it does look a bit more violent than the kind of thing I like to read.

[Philip]

Thanks, Bernadette. I hope I am right in saying this but I can't see anyone with the stomach for Mankell or Larsson being too bothered by Red April (and the writing leaves both standing).