By the beginning of the 20th century, realistic fiction was in terminal decline. Virginia Woolf tetchily complained about ‘this appalling narrative business…getting on from lunch to dinner’ and she, with Joyce, Kafka and others, expanded its scope, pushing its frontiers back to encompass the bizarre, the surreal, the workings of the subconscious mind.
Márquez took the same road as these pioneers who struggled to project a larger vision and create new forms in which to fashion age-old stories. Mixing history, dynastic sagas and journalistic events with myth and fantasy, he evolved the magical realist mode but went beyond it, imbuing his themes with political and philosophical dimensions that transcend space and time. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, he is among the greatest who change our perceptions, who compel us to look at ourselves and the world around us and say, ‘Yes. This is how things are here and now. This is me’.
As tributes continue to pour in, much newsprint is being expended on his best-known novels, yet The Autumn of the Patriarch is consistently ignored. Few have heard of it and even fewer have read this stunning satire on unbridled power that corrupts equally those who wield it, those who feed it with fawning sycophancy, and those who turn and look the other way.
The Patriarch is the nameless dictator of an anonymous country in any place, anywhere, and from his decomposing corpse rottenness spreads outwards like a plague eating into the life of things. As he lies in state in the palace, vultures hover and cows invade it, messing the carpets and chewing up the red velvet curtains, while the courtyard is covered with weeds and the stench of urine and faeces is everywhere. His life is recreated through his own recollections and those of others, a sordid record of bizarre crimes and perverted sex.
Young boys are thrown to the crocodiles on suspicion of plotting against him and, in an uncanny anticipation of a recent event in North Korea, his favourite General is meted out condign punishment for imagined disloyalty. Whereas Kim Jong-un’s uncle, also his senior-most General, was devoured by wild dogs in a public spectacle lasting an hour, his fictional predecessor is cooked and fed to his horrified guests at a banquet. Márquez describes the scene in gleeful detail. The corpulent soldier resembling a fattened turkey, baked golden brown and resplendent in his uniform complete with medals and epaulettes, is served up on a huge platter decorated all round with cauliflowers and laurel leaves, ironic emblems of victory. The sardonic humour that distinguishes Márquez’s novels is seen here at its brilliant best, macabre, terrifying and funny.
The Patriarch’s grossness is externalised in peculiar deformities — snow-white hands with unlined palms, huge square feet with the twisted talons of a hawk and a herniated testicle — and Nature herself is appalled by his tyrannies. His sainted mother rots slowly into her grave, his wife and son are torn to pieces by dogs, and even the sea deserts his benighted kingdom leaving behind ‘dead craters and moon-ash on an endless plain’. These events are not ‘real’ but ‘magical’, supremely appropriate symbols of an apocalyptic vision of evil.
In Márquez’s oeuvre, formal experiments are as various as the themes he explores. For instance, here we find no linear narrative, no character development. The book works more like a poem than a novel, an extended metaphor centred in The Patriarch’s corpse. Each of its six parts opens with the lifeless body, which is discovered, then embalmed, then laid out in state and so on, as the narrative keeps rounding back on itself. The past is recreated in a massive accumulation of imaginative detail building up to a climax, then falling away in a rhythmic ebb and flow that beguiles the reader into a total suspension of disbelief.
The major ‘characters’ have no names, no persona, and are no more than voices, fleeting recollections, mere items in a vast panorama. This refusal to particularise evil gives the book a significance beyond place and time. Nobody knows when The Patriarch was born or at what age he died, and his origins are shrouded in mystery for, supposedly, he was immaculately conceived. However, he is far from heroic. His lust for power so debases him that he sinks gradually into dementia and sleeps his time away in the garden hammock, a figure of ridicule, fooled by his underlings, denying his impotence by philandering with schoolgirls, and tortured by migraine, insomnia and terrifying nightmares.
Nowhere in this masterly anatomy of dictatorship is there a propagandist note. This strange, terrible, beautiful book is an extraordinary experience, a parable for the times in which we live.
Wherever there are pogroms and massacres, wherever petty tyrants strut about proclaiming their god-given right to govern, it should be made compulsory reading.
