Rural Mexico becomes more than simple description

Irma Voth, Miriam ToewsFaber: €17.15 Kindle: €9.15

IRMA VOTH is a 19-year-old Canadian Mennonite living in an isolated religious community in rural Mexico. She is an outcast, shunned by her father for disobeying his strict rules and marrying Jorge, a “greasy narco” she met at a rodeo.

What’s more, the novel opens with Irma doubly abandoned: Jorge has left her and refuses to return until she learns “how to be a better wife”.

Into this empty life steps Diego, an intense, worldly auteur who has come to film a drama about the so-called Mennonitzcha.

“Do you feel we can rebel?” he asks her, “rebel against our oppressors without losing our love, our tolerance, and our ability to forgive?”

Immediately taken with his confidence and generosity, Irma accepts his offer to work as a translator on the film.

This is not the first time that Miriam Toews, who hails from a similar background as her protagonist, has dramatised the conflict between conservative religion and the modern world. Comparable themes fuel her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness. However, in Irma Voth she is further inspired by her participation as an actress in Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 film Silent Light, a Cannes-winning picture set in a community much like Irma’s.

Film and novel also share a historical backdrop: the 1922 migration of 20,000 disaffected Mennonites from Manitoba to Chihuahua, where they were granted the freedom to live by their own values in return for contributing to the region’s agricultural economy. The author’s evocation of rural Mexico’s harsh beauty thus becomes more than simple description.

Having grown up a milkmaid and cheese-maker, Irma is drawn to the passionate, creative world of the film crew, “tattooed artists who lay around smoking and drinking espresso and arguing about politics and camera angles”. Her father, on the other hand, is resolute that all “art is a lie”, and while the fire-and-brimstone patriarch is a stock figure in coming-of-age stories like this, Toews imbues Julius Voth with real depth as the novel gradually reveals the story behind the family’s flight from Canada.

Indeed, from Irma’s younger sister Aggie to the gentle and poetic Wilson, a dying member of the film crew, it is Towes’s characters who illuminate this “pitch-black part of the world”.

The story’s heavy emotional content is intensified by the cruel humour of Irma’s world. There are some genuinely funny scenes with Diego’s pit-bull, “a soldier turned artist” who becomes more “philosophical” when fed marijuana by the cameramen. Yet the effect of this is only to underscore the tragedies of Irma’s own life: Yes, animals reciprocate her kindness, but her father treats her as if she is the dog.

An engaging, deceptively simple tragicomedy of considerable emotional heft, the journey of self-discovery plotted by Toews lures Irma towards the freedom of Mexico City and the manifold ways she might disappear among its teeming millions. Scene changes transform the novel’s second act, but Toews never loses focus on the core of her story: one girl’s authentic effort to understand her family and herself.