Reputations

Juan Gabriel Vasquez

Bloomsbury, £14.99

Review by Nick Major

ONE problem for the political satirist is the upholding of their own moral authority, or at least the appearance of it. It is difficult to attack another person’s character when your own is compromised. Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s new novel, Reputations, digs down into the heart of this sticky dilemma. Javier Mallarino is Columbia’s most feared and admired political cartoonist. Unlike the people he has spent his life skewering with the pen, his life has given him a physical anonymity that means he can walk through the streets of Bogota without anyone batting an eyelid. It also protects him against violent threats from those whose power he has undermined. Mallarino’s moral reputation is so firmly enmeshed with his artistic integrity that he has lost friends and family in the service of art.

Now in his sixties, his work has been powerful enough to "cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapon than paper and Indian ink." Any political elite would want to find some way to launch a counter-attack against such a man. There are a few tried and tested tactics. Some politicians buy caricatures of themselves to hang in their bathrooms. In Reputations, the state decide to put the gigantic Columbian machinery of sycophancy into action to create a public homage to the man they fear. Although Mallarino agrees to attend, he sees right through the establishment’s game.

As it turns out, not all publicity is good publicity. After the event, Mallarino is approached by a young female journalist called Lamanta Teal. He agrees to her request for an interview. Once she is in his house she tells him who she really is. Mallarino is forced to remember a few days from his past when he helped destroy the career of a puerile conservative congressman called Adolfo Cuellar. Lamanta’s determination to find out how this man has been implicated in her life forces Mallarino to reflect on the moral imperatives behind his own work, past and present.

Earlier in the book, Mallarino makes a speech to the adoring masses. He says that "political cartoons might exaggerate reality, but they can’t invent it. They can distort, but never lie". It is this porous border territory between lies in the real world and artistic distortion that Vasquez explores with a deft hand. We are invited into the satirist’s mind, and in pellucid prose we discover the nuances of thought, the doubts and assertions that go on behind the shell of moral fortitude. Vasquez has a searching style, which prods at the past and uncovers memories. For Mallarino, it is a strain on the present "to remember something important, to remember something banal, but always to remember, that’s what we all devote ourselves to all the time, that’s where our meagre energies go."

But Reputations is also a fascinating portrait of an artist. We discover the daily rituals and the aesthetic furniture of Mallarino’s life. On the wall of his study is a quote from Ricardo Rendon describing the political cartoon as "a stinger dipped in honey", and a series famous caricatures by Daumier and Gillray. Mallarino has a subtle understanding of his art form, his knowledge accumulated as a result of working day after day, year upon year, in the same vein. Caricature operates through a subversive magic. It can open wounds in the present and shape the images of future history. ‘"It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," says the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, a quote that haunts the cartoonist throughout the book.

Reputations continues Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s preoccupation with how the political can infiltrate the personal. His novel The Sound of Things Falling was about drug trafficking in Columbia. His debut, The Informers, looked back to South America in World War Two. At under two hundred pages, Reputations is a short novel, but a deeply engaging and well-crafted one. It pleases sentence by long, looping sentence, and explores an array of ideas, from the pains of memory to the moral complexities of a life lived as a rebel with a cause.