Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Discreet Hero: love and betrayal

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa has a talent for exposing murkier chapters of past and present Latin America.

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa writes morally complex novels.

Graham Greene famously had his ‘‘entertainments’’ and his more serious fiction, and at first glance the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa conform to the same neat classification. In that lighter category we can slot punchy satires such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973) or that effervescent ode to marriage, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977). In the more heavyweight category we can file scathing portraits of power and corruption such as Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and the magisterial political thriller The Feast of the Goat (2000).

However, on closer examination this kind of either-or binary seems too easy. Shoehorning one of Vargas Llosa’s sophisticated, multi­faceted and morally complex novels into one of two camps oversimplifies the work and disregards his wide range of literary techniques, his nuanced, calibrated character studies and his facility for exposing murkier chapters of past and present Latin America.

At the risk of elevating him to Shakespearean levels, this Peruvian Nobel laureate’s fiction is perhaps best divided into tragedies, comedies and histories. Vargas Llosa dazzles in all three.

Now firmly in his late period, it may be apt to call his latest novel, The Discreet Hero, a tragicomedy. Certainly its farcical interludes prevent it from being all-out tragedy and its dark undercurrents place it at a remove from comedy. Vargas Llosa’s careful blend of the two makes for a heady mix, one that for the most part works wonders.

The novel begins with a body blow. One morning, Felicito Yanaque, owner of a transport company in Piura, Peru, receives an anonymous letter asking for $500 a month in return for protection of his firm and his family against any ‘‘accident, unpleasantness, or threat from criminal elements’’.

Felicito is too proud to pay up. He has made a success of himself by living by his father’s dying words — ‘‘Never let anybody walk all over you’’ — repeating his motto like a mantra in times of crisis. This being his biggest crisis yet, he reports his faceless extortionist to the police. ‘‘This is the result of progress,’’ Sergeant Lituma tells him. ‘‘When Piura was a poor city, these things didn’t happen.’’

We leave Felicito seething at this poor consolation and sceptical of police efforts, and cut to a new section in a new city. Rigoberto is manager of an insurance company in Lima. Over a business lunch his rich octogenarian boss, Ismael, announces he would like Rigo­berto to witness his marriage to his maid, Armida, who is 40 years younger. It turns out that one of Ismael’s reasons for marriage is to disinherit his two money-grubbing sons.

Soon after the wedding, both ‘‘hyenas’’ are on the warpath, applying pressure on Rigo­berto to help them brand their father mentally unsound and Armida a manipulative gold-digger, and in doing so annul the marriage.

The novel continues to alternate between Piura and Lima, shifting from the plight of Felicito to the harassment of Rigoberto. In each narrative Vargas Llosa builds the tension. Felicito stands his ground but to his cost: he receives more letters, his offices are burned down and his mistress is kidnapped. Colorado, his ‘‘compadre, colleague, and competitor’’, urges him to stop being reckless and pay up. Instead Felicito becomes a ‘‘discreet hero’’ by challenging his persecutors in a notice in Piura’s principal newspaper.

Meanwhile, Rigoberto faces increased threats from the hyenas and a worry closer to home: his teenage son, Fonchito, claims to have regular encounters with a man called Edilberto Torres — a man no one else has seen. Does this outlandish person exist or is he a figment of the boy’s feverish imagination?

In most fiction, parallel narratives eventually deviate and intersect, and at one critical point Vargas Llosa establishes a common link between his separate tales and brings a clutch of characters together. He also dusts down an old trope and interlaces his dialogues, abruptly switching between old and current conversations to flashback and telescope events.

What he also reintroduces, less successfully, is a group of characters from previous books. Innocuous Sergeant Lituma from The Green House (1968) has a new lease of life here but Rigoberto, the flamboyant hedonist and culture-vulture from The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (1998) and one of Vargas Llosa’s finest creations, is a pale imitation of his former self. His raunchy double-act with wife Lucrecia is dispensed with, their titillating pillow-talk hushed up, and his beloved book-lined office, that ‘‘small space of civilisation’’, is no longer a den in which to appreciate art, music and literature but a bolthole from the ‘‘melodrama’’ or ‘‘soap opera’’ in which he now stars.

Characters are only worth seeing again if they do what they did before, and preferably better. Rigoberto and Lucrecia are so purged of past colour that we wonder why Vargas Lllosa didn’t just start afresh with a new couple.

Their rewritten identities may dismay but fortunately their plot-strand compels. It is Felicito’s story, though, that is the meatier of the two, having far more at stake and reading in places like a whodunit with built-in twists, pitfalls and ultimatums.

As a whole, The Discreet Hero is disjointed, but it still expertly traces broken lives, true love and dastardly betrayal, and always with perfect comic timing or palpable violence lurking around the corner.

Once again, this Latin American master demonstrates with acuity and panache that ‘‘human beings, each of us, are chasms filled with shadows’’.

Malcolm Forbes is an Edinburgh-based critic.

The Discreet Hero

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Faber & Faber, 400pp, $29.99