In the squalid and remote Mexican village of La Matosa, the body of a notorious woman known only as the Witch, provider of abortions for the local prostitutes and host of endless debauched parties for La Matosa’s ‘butt boys’ in her decrepit old mansion, turns up in an irrigation ditch. All hell breaks loose, and over the course of the novel, in eight whirlwind sections, we find out who the Witch really was, who killed her, and why. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor’s English language debut novel (trans. Sophie Hughes), is a murder mystery, of sorts, but it’s also a laying-bare of horrific contemporary poverty, superstition, violence and desperation that shows its readers a community thoroughly abandoned by the world.
The book’s eight sections give voice to this community at large, but the main characters – those who voice the lengthiest sections in a series of breathless outpourings of horror and rage and loneliness and grief – are Yesenia, who’s overcome with hatred, jealousy and disgust for her cousin, Luismi, who she’s seen consorting with the Witch; Luismi’s new fiancé, Norma, aged thirteen and pregnant by her stepfather; Brando, a self-loathing friend of Luismi’s who’s jealous of the Witch and is terrified that his attraction to his own friend will be uncovered; and Munra, Luismi’s mother’s crippled husband, who was driving the boys around the night the Witch dies, and, like Yesenia, suspects that Luismi killed her.
Stylistically, think Ducks, Newburyport and Jose Saramago crossed with James Kelman and Roberto Bolaño: it’s relentlessly, unflinchingly bleak in its portrayal of contemporary drug-addled poverty, misogyny and homophobia. We’ve got girls abused and locked into household drudgery, pre-teen pregnancy and disease, and boys forced by an unremitting culture of vicious machismo into rape and incest. The book’s voiced by a succession of characters living hopeless lives they’d never have chosen, trammelled by their peers and families, misunderstood from all angles. The horror of the action aside, the book’s perhaps really about silence: everybody’s trapped, nobody’s getting out, and to express vulnerability or fear is beyond unimaginable. Each section – each glimpse into a new mind – is a galloping, immersive monologue, a concentrated mining of solipsistic misery. And throughout all this, the Witch remains silent: she’s a resourceful, practical girl; she’s crazy, hoarding secret inherited wealth; she’s a man in drag, desperately in love with Luismi; she’s none/all of the above. What she is, though, to the village, is a straw man to blame for the ills that have befallen this miserable part of the world: she summons the devils, her parties are a locus for evil. And when she’s dead, then surely the hurricanes are to blame – not the companies and government that have abandoned these people.
Luismi, too, goes unvoiced, meaning that neither of the two central queer-coded characters get to account for themselves: in this narrative choice, then, we can see again encoded the oppressiveness of the hetero-masculinity that’s destroying everyone’s lives – not just theirs.
It’s not an unrelentingly miserable novel, however, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so, and it’s definitely not glorifying poverty: while its characters live awful lives, and do and think awful things, they’re not awful people: they have moments of tenderness, they long for acceptance and love, and they have moments where these shine through. They make horrible mistakes and they know it. They’re victims of their circumstances and they could have been otherwise, though Melchor isn’t naïve enough to suggest anything like redemption or a happy ending. We blame witches and the weather for our bad behaviour, but in the end all this, the novel reminds us, is what we do to one another.
Any Cop?: Inventive and horrible and captivating and brutal. A tour de force that you probably shouldn’t lend to friends of delicate constitutions.
Valerie O’Riordan
Bookmunch 