The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Edge of Existence

Almost everyone in The Green House lives at the extreme edge of existence. But it is not death or annihilation that threatens; rather, it is an entirely different kind of existence. The novel opens with the abduction of two Amazonian Indian girls, an event that rips them out of their way of life and puts them into an alien land in which literally nothing has meaning for them. This is not merely displacement; it is an extinguishing of their former lives in all but their bodily functions. At least that is what is intended by the missionaries and soldiers who perceive this trauma as a noble cause and moral duty. Some victims feel a genetic pull to the former jungle-life but reversion is impossible.

The theme of fragile existence runs throughout the narrative as it shifts continuously between the dense tropical rain forest of North Eastern Peru and the enormous coastal desert lying on the other side of the Andes around Piura. It is difficult to imagine two more extreme environments within such proximity to each other. Water is the basic substance of one world; sand of the other. Both substances rain down on the inhabitants continuously, and change their environment visibly as they watch. There is no forest-land that cannot become water as capricious rivers change course; and each morning when the residents of the desert-city arise, every surface is covered once again by the sand that erodes its houses and seeks to cover them completely.

But it is religion, military force and commercial interests, not water or sand, that erode existence most rapidly and most decisively. The primitive jungle tribes are mirrored in the closely knit coastal communities of the Mangaches, descendants of the African slaves brought by the Spanish from Madagascar in the 16th century. Each group is distinguished by, among other traits, language and colour (red and black a recurring theme), which isolate them from the white population. Both groups are constantly threatened by exploitation, expropriation and extinction. These common threats force them into contact with one another in the world of smuggling, human trafficking, and, most significantly for Vargas Llosa's story, prostitution.

Life is universally degraded in the worlds Vargas Llosa describes. The Green House in the desert is a brothel. But functionally so is the Mission in the jungle which grooms young native girls for the Governor. All women - white, red and black - are chattels with only minor differences in their status as slaves. Sexual violence is always present or imminent. Rape is the usual form of courtship. Alcohol is a basic food group, consumed continuously by men whenever available. Cocaine is a festive alternative. All white people suffer terribly from the heat and molestation by insects, and they despise their environment as much as they despise the reds, blacks and women. Government is merely a criminal monopoly of power. Native tribes terrorise one another and in turn are terrorised by the whites. Bandits dominate the desert and the jungle.

Reflecting this existential fragility, the narrative shifts unpredictably from sentence to sentence in time and place, even more energetically than in some of Vargas Llosa's other novels. Characters travel under different names depending on which of the two primary locations they are in. Different characters have the same name. Conversations are interleaved. Sentences are often fragmentary and appear as badly translated obfuscations. Add the Peruvian cultural allusions strewn throughout and the result Is a sort of literary jigsaw that often demands trying an identity or meaning to see if it fits; if it doesn't the reader can only choose another possibility and tentatively move on.
 
The Green House is consequently an exhausting work. It demands continuous close attention to detail to catch signals of identity and continuity. Emotionally, it is frankly tiring to immerse oneself in 400 pages of unremitting squalor and hopelessness. And a not inconsiderable degree of confusion must be tolerated as the narrative unfolds. So, all in all, not a work for the casual or faint-hearted reader.

View all my reviews