FIRST THOUGHTS: Vargas Llosa fails to reach the heights of past

FOR the first three quarters of this 325-page novel, Peruvian master, Mario Vargas Llosa seems to be spinning, in alternating chapters, two quite separate — albeit thematically similar — yarns.

* The Discreet Hero

* (translated by Edith Grossman)

* Faber & Faber, €16.99, €13.89

* Review: Billy O’Callaghan

Felicito Yanaque is the elderly owner of a successful transport company. He is caught in a loveless but comfortable marriage, and has two sons — one who looks like him, the other who could not be more different — learning the business. He also keeps a beautiful girlfriend, Mabel, many years his junior, in a house across town. As far as he is concerned, it’s love, though he is careful not to ask too many questions.

But his world is turned upside down when letters start arriving, marked with a spider drawing. He soon learns, upon taking the matter to the police (Captain Silva and Sergeant Lituma — actually, the novel’s two most fascinating characters), that such extortion rackets are already fleecing the other businesses of Piura, and dire retribution is threatened should he not fall into line.

Felicito looks small and weak, but the anonymous criminals have not reckoned on his iron will. Coming from a destitute background, his success was built largely on an enduring piece of advice his father offered: “Never let anyone walk all over you in this life.” To give in would betray the memory of a man who’d sacrificed everything for his son. And even when the stakes are raised, with the kidnapping of Mabel, the trucker refuses to yield.

The novel’s second narrative thread presents another wealthy old businessman, Don Ismael Carrera, who enlists the assistance of a long-time confidante, Don Rigoberto (a recurring Vargas Llosa character), to stand as witness at a necessarily clandestine wedding ceremony. Ismael is marrying his housekeeper, another woman barely half his age, in defiance of the wishes of his twin sons, generally referred to as ‘The Jackals’, who are terrified of losing out on their inheritance.

Knowing he will have to pay a high price, and that the Jackals are capable of anything, even murder, Rigoberto agrees, even though he has problems of his own, specifically with his son, Fonchito, a saintly teen suffering visitations from a man calling himself Edilberto Torres, who may be an hallucination or, quite possibly, the devil incarnate.

Mario Vargas Llosa, a one-time Peruvian presidential candidate who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, is rightly regarded as one of the world’s greatest living writers. A remarkable stylist, his best books are ambitious narratives that aim to present a broad canvas portrait of Peru (and sometimes the countries beyond), fearless in their political and social judgements and unflinching in their portrayals of lust, violence and all the perceived sins of the human heart.

Novels like Conversation in the Cathedral and his daring historical masterpiece, The War at the End of the World rank comfortably among the finest, in any language, of the post-war era, but since the brutal, brilliant realism of his 2000 offering, The Feast of the Goat’, his wilder ambitions seem to have waned. What we tend to get now are glimpses of the genius at work.

The Discreet Hero, his 17th novel in a career now spanning more than 50 years, is no different. Part of the problem will always be the towering benchmark set by his past work. A consideration of fathers and their sons, scars of the past, betrayals and skewed moralities, the greatness is again evident in flashes, most obviously with the adroit merging of scenes and conversations in defiance of time, the able fusing of life and memory. But there is also a looseness, or a lack of urgency, not found in the author’s finest books.

What we get, ultimately, is a good, comfortable novel rather than a great one.