Reviews and Comments

I loved this book as I read it. It probably helps that I identified with bits of the [unnamed but clearly an authorial self-insert] narrator/protagonist's experiences from before the book started; more on that in a moment. But it's also an entertaining story, and very engagingly written - many chapters had me laughing out loud at key moments even though the book's in no way a comedy overall.

Much of the book feels like a very sharp criticism of British society--I identified strongly with the narrator's endless experiences of people putting their assumptions over her experience, and needing to remind her that she doesn't quite fit in--and of the government / civil service's overconfidence in its own intrinsic goodness. In the face of that it was at times frustrating seeing the protagonist be so deeply invested in the Ministry and her job standing in it, but if I take a more critical eye to myself it becomes easy to understand as a reaction to that never quite being allowed to fit in. That part cut deep for me personally.

I also appreciated how much the book is also a lockdown story. I've been grumbling lately about how little art I've encountered that seems to process the covid pandemic and the experience of lockdowns in retrospect. And here came this book, clearly using the roommates-in-hiding portion of its arc to work through some feelings about that experience. More of this please!

The ending felt... not exactly too neat in that it does leave some ambiguity, but too abrupt. It felt like most of the story proceeded at a fairly comfortable pace, and then suddenly the author felt a need to bring it to a close with a sharp turn.

#SFFBookClub

This is one of those books that took over my head at times, and I'll be thinking about for a long while after finishing it.

Before I say any more, general content warnings for the book itself: there is a lot of gruesome violence, and particularly physical and sexual abuse of children in here. Some of the violence is what I understand to be realistic descriptions of Argentina's 1970s & 80s history, some is taken much further than that. It never feels gratuitous in that it establishes characters and story, but it is A Lot.

So, a simple summary of this huge book would be to say that it's Enriquez processing the horrors of Argentina's dictatorships through fantastical macabre fiction. But that could be just the first chapter. As it goes on, the book encompasses so much more about modern colonialism, the utter ghoulishness of the rich, the hollowness of Swinging London, the AIDS crisis, and so on. The most consistent theme is how completely those with power are willing to treat those without it as un-people, which makes the death / immortality cult at the centre of the story a perfect microcosm. And the ways different characters struggle to make sense of what's going on with limited or no knowledge of that cult feels like a very realistic exploration of how conspiracy theories develop.

I'm definitely a little biased in favour of this book because the author and the main character are just a couple of years older than me, and because an assortment of random factors left me a little less ignorant about Argentina's 20th century history than most of Latin America's. So the real world parts and the cultural references hit home particularly well - even down to a scene when Gaspar puts on "The Cure's new album" to work through his feelings about something and I could identify which album and remember how I'd felt when I first heard it. But I also think it's just a very well told story in general.