In October 2012 – on my birthday, no less – I had the distasteful experience of being in the same room as Javier Duarte, governor of Veracruz state, Mexico, in the town hall of its capital city, Xalapa. He was giving a press conference to open a literary festival, among whose guest writers were JMG Le Clézio, Wole Soyinka, Jeanette Winterson, Enrique Vila-Matas and Valeria Luiselli.
This was a chance for the reviled Duarte – widely known to be in bed (and a whole lot more) with the infamous Zetas cartel – to burnish his image. Twelve journalists had been murdered in Veracruz over the preceding year, making it the most dangerous place in the world for press (including war zones). The federal government, terrified something would go wrong during the festival, had disbanded Duarte’s corrupt police force in its entirety, replacing it with the marine corps.
All the same, the reporter Roberto Rizzo Murrieta was stabbed to death on the first day of the festival, right in the town centre.
In 2015, photojournalist Rúben Espinosa and fellow activists were tortured and murdered in a suburb of Mexico City after speaking out about the criminal activity of Javier Duarte. Kilkenny-born journalist Tim MacGabhann was living only streets away. His thriller Call Him Mine, published last year, imagined these killings and a subsequent string of violence from the perspective of someone even closer to them.
In the story, Andrew, an Irishman abroad, is recovering from addiction and the murder of his boyfriend and colleague Carlos. Living in Poza Rica, a natural resource-rich city in Veracruz, reporter Andrew and photographer Carlos find the body of someone linked to an embezzlement and money-laundering conspiracy involving the state governor. Their investigation gets Carlos killed. Andrew, a foreigner, is spared.
LSD after-effects
How to Be Nowhere begins a few years later, with Andrew sober now but subject to long-term LSD after-effects, dreaming vividly of Carlos and the other dead from his time in Mexico City. Janiel Uruchurtu, the governor at the centre of the previous book’s corruption, has fled to Guatemala just like Duarte eventually did, with an estimated $35 million of public money.
While seeking to pursue the story with Maya, another journalist, Andrew is blackmailed into helping a cartel track down the missing daughter of boss Puccini, as well as helping them find Uruchurtu before he can sell out all his associates in a plea deal. Andrew won’t just be fact-finding. It isn’t long before he’s leaning out of an armoured jeep, shooting a sawn-off at Guatemalan police.
MacGabhann’s writing can be sharp: hard-boiled, with moments of lyricism. Andrew drinks for “that emptied-out clarity, where all you are is what’s happening around you – the salt nick of the air, the cool sand under your nape, the crash of the ocean loud and rhythmic and pouring into your ears”. One character is described as “an agronomist who’d learned his English from Deep Space Nine and Xbox Live”. Clouds seen from a plane are “grooved with pressure”.
Tellingly, violence generates the book’s most vivid style. A tortured policeman’s “sobs were just a way to breathe”; the Glock Andrew carries “gleamed out at me from the egg-box lining of black foam, so clean and black and shiny that it looked like a hole in matter, just a straight-up gap on nothing”.
Faces removed
Being one of a series, How to Be Nowhere drops us in the middle of the story, into Andrew’s moral development and acclimatisation to violence. He has already been kidnapped “not once, but twice”. He’s seen activists with their faces removed, and students’ limbs being stashed in fracking wells. We must quickly accept this world as Andrew has had to.
Though everything is set up with speed and efficiency, there is something about this slickness that is numbing. Maybe because of his emptiness since Carlos’s murder and the depletions of addiction, Andrew adapts quickly to the role of hardman. He pistol-whips his enemies, and enjoys implying he is carrying a gun or at least gets some sort of external relish from the performance. He grows only too happy to help conduct what Puccini calls the governor’s “alternate trial”.
While one can’t say the book glamourises violence directly – we are always made aware of the death toll and the decades-long political background to the atrocities described – the book leans in to torture, the vengeances exacted that allow the European narrator to partake in its adrenaline (which we become implicit in, through a twice-removed vicariousness).
How To Be Nowhere’s impulse is escapist and, in this untroubled but gripping romp through violence, it feels sometimes as if we escape into issues of great seriousness rather than exploring them. It’s a shame, since we already have plenty of entertainment dedicated to narcos and corrupt cops shooting each other.
Aside from good prose and a strong voice, does this offer much we couldn’t have already got from Netflix?
JS Tennant is the editor of adda magazine. His first book, a non-fiction work about Cuba, will be published by William Collins
