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No one would ever accuse Giles Blunt of mindlessly dispensing the mixture as before. First he took the John Cardinal police procedurals in an unexpected and moving direction, then he followed that up with the fundamentally cheerful NO SUCH CREATURE and now he presents a harrowing consideration of the meaning of torture in the modern world. The novel opens in El Salvador, during the civil war of the 1980s. Victor Peņa is a young man who in happier days had dreamt of law school, but as he comes from a military family, had little choice but to enlist. Victor is not a brave man. In his first real engagement with the guerillas, he is covered with the blood and brains of his dying sergeant and only rescued by happenstance. Thereafter, his natural timidity blossoms into such full-blown terror that he is shortly condemned by a court-martial to death for cowardice under fire. Luckily (or perhaps not) his uncle, a high ranking officer who now commands a small and vicious torture facility where captured guerillas and anyone unlucky enough to be suspected of involvement with the insurgency are subjected to unspeakable abuse. Victor is to redeem himself by learning how to torture without regret. It will, his uncle says, make a man of him. He never masters the regret part, but the torture he learns to perform with reasonable efficiency. He must, or he will himself die and quite horribly. One of the prisoners is a woman who calls herself Maria Sanchez (the local equivalent of Mary Smith). She withstands the rape, the electric shocks, and beatings so valiantly that even her captors are impressed. Impressed, but not moved. Eventually, even she breaks, but not before Victor, in a transport of terror, knocks out one of her teeth. The second half moves to New York, where Victor has managed to flee using the papers of one of the torture victims who was killed. Here he hopes for a heads-down anonymity and, if possible, a bit of redemption for what he has done. Ironically, he will be offered a chance at just that, but whether he can take advantage of the possibility or whether his ingrained cowardice will condemn him to a life of punishing self-contempt is the question that informs the rest of the novel. I do not know what medieval torturers thought of themselves as they went home to lunch having stretched a victim on the rack, but the modern justification "if I didn't do it, they would have killed me and someone else would have done it anyway" has been current since at least the Nuremberg trials. Nor, if we are honest, is it an excuse we can shrug off easily. Few of us have not asked ourselves what we would do in similar circumstances. And, though we would like to imagine that we would bravely accept death rather than harm an innocent stranger, the famous experiments of Stanley Milgram suggest we had better not put it to the test. In BREAKING LORCA, Blunt takes an unusual approach to the question. The emphasis in the opening torture section is on Victor Peņa's response to what he sees and ultimately what he does. The victim appears as almost opaque, as I suppose victims might do to their torturers. Nevertheless, Blunt does not suggest that we feel any particular sympathy for the unlikeable Peņa. We understand what motivates him, but the contempt he expresses for himself seems fully justified. He is contemptible. Escaping to New York doesn't change much. He is still largely motivated by fear. Not to put too fine a point on it, Victor is a coward and Blunt never lets him off the hook - Victor is not the victim, Lorca is. But Victor is also not the one who established torture as an instrument of political power. Nor is he like certain removed American interests who reap what benefits they may from torture without actually getting their hands wet. The torture enterprise requires sadists, but it requires Victors also. This is difficult material and may account for why this book has unaccountably slipped under the radar. It's been out half a year and has garnered few reviews that I can find. While this can hardly be recommended as cheerful beach reading, rivetting though it may be, it is a challenging book. Sometimes, we really have to venture outside our comfort zone, even in the summer.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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