‘Score!’ – Good Offices by Evelio Rosero

Evelio Rosero is primarily known in the UK for The Armies, the novel that took home the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Good Offices is only the second of his books to appear here in English translation. Of course, back in Columbia, he’s got another five novels and two story collections to his name, as well as the Columbian National Literature Award. If there’s any justice in the literary world, we’ll someday get to read those other books, too. In the meantime, Good Offices is that rare beast – a funny, evocative book that mixes shadowy violence with beauty and hope, all in under one hundred and fifty pages. Score!

Tancredo, our hero, is a hunchback acolyte in the service of Father Almido, the priest who’s raised, educated and trained him since he was a child. Living with them in their Bogotá church are the sacristan, Celeste Machado; Machado’s god-daughter, Sabina; and three elderly widows, the almost interchangeable and definitely inscrutable Lilias, who cook, clean and spy upon everything that goes on within the presbytery’s walls. When the novel opens, Tancredo’s education has stalled: as long as he’s running Almido’s Community Meals (‘Tuesdays for the blind, Mondays for the whores’), there’s no incentive for his benefactor to send him on to university. And then there’s the disconsolate Sabina, Tancredo’s childhood friend and sometime lover, who’s demanding they run away together immediately – not to mention the Thursday crew of parasitic elderly parishioners who refuse to leave after their Community Meal and insist on playing dead so that Tancredo has to prod and tickle them to figure out who’s legitimately deceased. On this particular Thursday, though, Almido and Machado have been called away and it’s a substitute that takes the evening Mass – the peculiar, charismatic and drunken Father Matamoros, who captivates the congregation and, over the course of a single, rainy night, draws out all the secrets that Almido’s household have long kept buried.

Tancredo is a great main character – conflicted, frustrated and intelligent – and he’s a perfect guide to the inner workings of this particular parochial house. Father Matamoros’ descent upon the church splits its mundane world apart, and Tancredo realises that he hasn’t been half as attentive to his surroundings and his cohabitants as he’d thought he was; now he can only watch, stunned, with the reader, as his life is cracked wide open. Rosero avoids the obvious trap of marking out Almido and Matamoros as the clear baddy and goodie, respectively – everything here is tinged with ambiguity and uncertainty, and it’s up to the reader, along with Tancredo, to figure out where his moral allegiance lies. Sabina’s probably the weakest character – a frustrated, petulant teenager – but she’s entertaining; it’s the Lilias, however, that stole the show for me: a black-clad coven of flitting furies, they confuse and taunt Tancredo, and finally, inspired by the new, renegade priest, retake control of their fates.

Any Cop?: Rosero writes with superb concision and dark, creepy humour. If you could mash Saramago’s The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reiss up with Hilary Mantel’s Fludd and Bolano’s By Night in Chile, then toss in a generous dollop of Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, you might get something approaching Good Offices. And this might seem like a petty consideration, but it’s short – to read something utterly lacking in extraneous detail, that’s entirely compelling and that you can get through in one, intense afternoon – well, that’s rather glorious.

Valerie O’Riordan