For some reason, Vargas Llosa (who's from Peru) hit on the idea of writing a book about the end of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Or, more specifically, the end of Rafael Trujillo himself, who was shot in 1961 after thirty-odd years of ruling the country (officially or unofficially). The novel has three main plot strands: one follows a fictional character, Urania Cabral, daughter of a loyal Trujillista politician (also fictional), who returns to her home country in the Nineties for the first time since she left it at the age of fourteen after a nasty experience involving Trujillo. Urania feels the need to confront her father, even though he's suffered a major stroke and is more dead than alive. Plot strand number two follows Trujillo during the last day of his life more than thirty years earlier. Plot strand number three concerns his assassins, as they sit waiting for his car that same evening, debating whether he's going to show up at all. Most chapters are told from one of these three viewpoints, though some other characters join the mix towards the end of the novel. For instance, we get a chapter told from the point of view of Trujillo's successor Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president who gains real power once his Chief is gone and uses it to steer the country towards democracy (but who nevertheless comes across as something of a slippery customer).
At first, I was frankly bored and irritated by the novel, fervently wishing that I'd tried Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter instead. All three plot strands seemed mostly an excuse for exposition. The unfortunate Urania has read obsessively about the Trujillo regime as a (not very effective) way of coping with her trauma, which is mighty convenient for an author who wants to show off what he knows. Also, the "Trujillo bad" message conveyed wasn't exactly mind-blowing. Wow, a modern dictator behaves in a modern-dictatory manner? Whatever next, dog bites man?
After some time, though, the Trujillo part of the story started to become more interesting. It made me sit up when, in the interactions with his goons, he didn't come out of it altogether badly. Modern dictators are often portrayed as either monstrous or pathetic (sometimes both), which can make us who are fortunate enough to live in democracies feel rather insufferably smug. We can tell ourselves there's no way we'd ever buy what these freaks and losers were selling. Vargas Llosa doesn't go down this easy path. His version of Trujillo is not without good points. He's disciplined, hard-working, intelligent and convinced that what he's doing is the best thing for his country. Even his enemies give him credit for appreciating talent in others. It's not hard to imagine how this man rose to power and kept it for more than three decades. At the same time, you understand why even some of his closest associates want to get rid of him (perhaps especially his closest associates – though generous with money, he's not the world's greatest boss). Even Vargas Llosa's focus on Trujillo's problems with his failing prostate doesn't come across as merely sneering. It's there to tie in with the Urania part of the story, but the prostate problems also serve as a symbol for old age, the one enemy the old bruiser is unable to fight against.
The conspirator part of the story also picks up as soon as they literally get into gear, ready to carry out their assassination plans, and things start to go pear-shaped from the word go. Here, it's the events rather than the characterisation that fascinate. The conspirators are an amiable enough bunch, if a little interchangeable. (There's an awful lot of name-dropping here and elsewhere – I must confess to only getting a reasonably clear idea of the role of one in ten characters mentioned throughout the novel. Why was that guy Fifí in the plot again?) Vargas Llosa does them something of a disservice by focusing on their personal reasons for wanting to kill Trujillo, when a little more patriotic fervour wouldn't have gone amiss. In the end, though, the tale of the conspiracy is engaging mainly because of how badly it's going. The assassins may succeed in killing Trujillo, but they are endearingly rubbish at plotting generally. When a high-ranking ally lets them down, they have no plan B and no exit strategy. They've not even considered how or with whom they could hide if things turned dangerous, which was always a strong possibility. I groaned when one of them confided that he'd purchased a strychnine pill to commit suicide with if the worst came to the worst. You don't commit suicide with strychnine! It's a horrible death. What, did the regime ban Agatha Christie books or something?
The Urania part of the story, though, never quite gelled with me. True, the event that triggered her trauma, which she recounts to her aunt and cousins when she's accused of being ungrateful to her father, is pretty horrific. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I thought she was a poorly written character and I couldn't feel much for her. In some scenes, as when at first she tries to avoid upsetting her relations, she becomes more human, but before long she's back in Scarred Victim mode. Quite often she acts as a plot contrivance to impart information to the readers – telling her relatives the gist of her past experiences would have been quite enough, but as we readers need to know the gruesome details, she recounts it all. When she doubts that she's done the right thing afterwards, she cheers herself up by remembering the fate of Trujillo's Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes. Vargas Llosa clearly wants us to know he got his comeuppance in the end, but as said comeuppance came with collateral damage, it's in somewhat poor taste for Urania – and, I must say, Vargas Llosa – to gloat over it. More importantly, Urania has no reason to think about Abbes at all.
One more problem with the Urania story, which wouldn't have mattered in another kind of novel, is that she's a fictional character. If the whole novel had been mainly about fictional characters, with the historical characters serving as a backdrop, the tale of Urania's woes would have worked better, as an illustration of the sort of thing that could happen to you during Trujillo's reign. But sandwiched between characters with real counterparts and events that really did happen, the fictional elements feel awkward. The real Trujillo may have been a beast to some poor real-life fourteen-year-old, but he can't be accused of being a beast to Urania (or her father, for that matter), because they didn't exist. And if we are supposed to view Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat as merely a fictional character, then what was the object of the exercise?
In the end, however, I was impressed with parts of the novel, and I don't completely regret choosing it over Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Vargas Llosa's instincts as a novelist prevent it from becoming merely a political pamphlet, and the message that at least I was left with – that dictatorships are generally a terrible idea, even when the person in charge doesn't appear to be a total nutcase – is not a bad one.
