A centuries-long manhunt stretches across Mexico and beyond

NOT EVEN THE DEAD, by Juan Gómez Bárcena. Translated by Katie Whittemore.

We’ll never know what the late Cormac McCarthy would have thought of Juan Gómez Bárcena’s “Not Even the Dead,” but I bet the novel would have appealed to him, and Roberto Bolaño and Joseph Conrad as well, if for no reason other than their egos. Each of them would have seen strong evidence of their influence on Bárcena, whose previous work – a short story collection and award-winning novel, “The Sky Over Lima” – has already established him as a leading writer in Spain. His latest book, beautifully translated by Katie Whittemore, only adds to his stature, thanks to its successful blend of ambitious literary dynamism with contemporary social and political commentary.

“Not Even the Dead” begins as a Borgesian fable: “Here is the story of how Juan chased Juan from near Puebla to the border of the United States, a journey of 475 Spanish miles and quite a few years.” What follows is a confident, intricate, transhistorical chronicle, told through the experiences of two men: Juan de Toñanes, an everyday ex-conqueror who keeps an inn in Spanish-ruled 16th-century Mexico, and Juan the Indian, a charismatic, missionary-taught native man who causes trouble for both church and state.

The former is hired by the Spanish crown to track down the latter. Known as the Father to his followers, Juan the Indian is the leader of a violent, fanatical movement of ordinary people drawn by his ferocious energy and his heretical, destabilizing propositions about faith and politics. Juan de Toñanes, on the other hand, is non-committal and curt during his unexpected recruitment by Spanish soldiers, but this lukewarm temperament appeals to a colonial government seeking a neutralizer.

For a reward of gold and something new to do with his time, the innkeeper agrees to find the father, kill him, and retrieve a valuable and dangerous book in his possession. And so, like an anti-Quixote, he begins his search without fanfare, heading north, expecting to be home in a few weeks. It doesn’t matter that no one can tell Juan what his quarry really looks like. For the rest of the novel, this discomfort proves fruitful.

Through Juan’s dutiful efforts, Bárcena shows us why the Father has such a dangerous pull. A monk who taught the Indian as a child, Juan proudly tells of the boy’s zeal for the Bible and for Christianity, especially the harder and darker parts, and how he was quick to condemn his own father for his Aztec devotion. The biographical details Juan obtains from everyone he meets are always offset by unresolved questions about what became of the father given rumors of a tyrannical turn in his later life.

“Even within the four walls of a monastery, certain terrible things are heard whether one wants to hear them or not,” the monk notes. “You have to choose whether to believe them or not. You have already chosen.” In fact, Juan isn’t entirely happy with the choice he’s made about the nature of the man he pursues, something that never changes as he encounters both the powerful and the poor, in royal government offices and remote failing villages.

Juan’s interlocutors are united in their sense of the mystical profundity of the Father and his effects on others; none of them can say much more than that, whether Juan is investigating alone or supported by a cohort of colonial soldiers temporarily transferred to him. The people Juan encounters alternate between those physically and psychologically abused from their run-ins with the Vader, and those who are rabid in their devotion to him, including a fast-talking delirious character modeled on the Harlequin from Conrad’s ” Heart of Darkness” – a connection that sets Juan and the father as Marlow and Kurtz.

Elsewhere, the Vader – as Juan discovers when examining the pages of the Bible that the Vader has narcissistically reimagined as his own story – comes across as a variation of the monstrous philosopher-king Judge Holden, from McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ . (The synoptic headlines that precede each chapter also read in homage to that novel.) Indeed, Bárcena’s well-read riffs are a little too flashy at times, but the novel isn’t ultimately undermined by these bouts of top-shelf fanboy fiction .

Over time it becomes clear that Juan will never find the Father – something he ponders in stream-of-consciousness passages between his visits with witnesses and future guides. Moreover, his journey of several weeks inexplicably becomes inexorably a journey of months, years, decades and finally centuries. The Father is always ahead of him, with different labels corresponding to different incarnations of power: anti-imperial, anti-clerical, pro-revolution, pro-worker.

All the while, he has been celebrated by some as a beloved defender of the weak and innocent, while feared by others as a tyrant and, in a section recalling Bolaño’s “2666”, a perpetrator of sexual violence. People inevitably confuse Juan with the Father, inviting reflections on the interplay of identity and action, self and other, and on the mutually transformative relationship between who we are and what we seek.

As for Juan himself, he never gives up. Bárcena writes: “All that remains is to move forward. To not look back. Not to ask questions. North, always north. Forward, always forward, without changing course or questioning, for nothing remains behind him; move on, only the future can wait. Juan is driving into that future.” By the end of the novel, that future has become the modern-day United States, and Juan de Toñanes is brilliantly revealed as a figure of our present moment: along with many others, he rides the Beast, the infamous train that carries migrants from South Africa. and Central America to the United States. American border.

After the protagonist makes his way to a nation as unsettling in its material abundance as it is in its animosity toward him, Bárcena moves into a Trump cameo. The xenophobic language that follows dumps so much of this impressive novel’s well-crafted, consistently sustained ambiguity—primarily about what it means to search for something you may not want to find—into a screaming, orangish absolute. But at least it contributes to Juan finally wondering if he might want to give up on his perilous quest, look elsewhere, and maybe even go home.

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto. His latest book is ‘Dante’s Indiana’.