Fixed Grimace
Ley Garrote*
Joaquín Guerrero-Casasola
Roca, 2007, 205 pages
Javier Sanchez Zapatero
Translation: Karen vincent-Jones
Ley
Garrote (The
Law of the Garrotte), winner
of the Ist L'H Confidencial Prize
for Best International Crime Novel,
awarded jointly by L'Hospitalet Town Council, Barcelona, and the
Roca publishing house, introduces Joaquín Guerrero-Casasola
to the Spanish literary stage. Born in Mexico but domiciled in
Spain for many years, Guerrero-Casasola is not, however, a newcomer
to the world of literature, as a long career as a scriptwriter
has taken him to such far-flung- and widely different- places as
El Salvador and Serbia while writing television scripts. His televisual
experience shows in the novel, which is extremely visual and proceeds
at breakneck pace. With no time wasted and no danger of boring
the reader, The Law of
the Garrotte, which reads easily
and entertainingly, provides a dizzying succession of events which
are as entertaining as they are crude, and as acidic as they are
violent. Softened by the irony and humour of his style, the events
narrated by the author in the book end up being so terrible and so
hard to take that our initial laughter freezes into a fixed grimace.
As in the novels of James Ellroy or Paco Ignacio Taibo II, the suffocating
pressure of the social environment, dreadful and inhuman, tinges
the entire story with a darkness devoid of soul.
The constant factors in the book are the main character, Gil Baleares,
and the troubling and violent setting of Mexico City, seen as a true
asphalt jungle in which everyday life is a fight for survival. The
events of the novel unfold when the main character, an ex-policeman
turned low-life private investigator, is hired to investigate a kidnapping.
Short of money to buy the new car he has set his heart on, a Japanese
make he is obsessed with, he takes on the case thinking that it will
provide him with the solution to his money problems and the fulfilment
of his four-wheeled dream.
However, what starts off as a simple professional assignment for
the ironic and talkative investigator- whose crazy behaviour sometimes
reminds us of the unhinged and nameless hero of some of Eduardo Mendoza's
novels- becomes difficult to resolve, as we might guess, due to the
bizarre conditions imposed by the kidnappers before they will release
the victim, and ends up by becoming a personal quest as which draws
Baleares more and more deeply into an investigation complicated by
corrupt policemen, strange law officials who hamper his enquiries,
the bizarre behaviour of the victim's family and phantoms from the
past. All of these create a malicious fog of violence that blurs
the boundaries of legality and enables Guerrero-Casasola to provide
a critical view of Mexican reality. As in classic works in the genre,
the city itself, a harsh and hostile place, becomes a character in
the book. The frantic everyday life of Mexico City, a perfect setting
for a noir novel, seems like the only possible milieu for
Gil Baleares' misadventures.
Among the minor characters who swarm
throughout the book, one stands out in particular: Ángel “El Perro” Baleares,
the hero's father, a former brutal and corrupt policeman who swaggered
freely through Mexico City in the 70s and now, stricken by Alzheimers,
maintains a surreal love-hate relationship with his son. His illness
gives rise to some of the wildest and most outlandish incidents
in the novel, while at the same time his gaze is presented as one
of the most lucid in the novel, thus demonstrating that frequently
the most distorting lenses can show things as they really are.
Using boxing terminology, Julio Cortázar
used to say, in a now famous quotation, that the novel won on points
but the short story won by a knock-out. The irresistable pull and
the intense, deafening rhythm of The Law of
the Truncheon bears
out the Argentine author's dictum. Entertaining, overwhelming and
stripped-down, de Joaquín Guerrero-Casasola's first novel
wins like the great masters of the ring, with a massive knockout
punch you can't ignore.
* The Law of the Truncheon
