Rating: 2/5
Review:
Dull
The Hot Country is set during the American occupation of Veracruz,
Mexico in the months preceding the First World War. Christopher
Marlowe Cobb is a US journalist who becomes involved in trying to
uncover some sinister German activity among Mexican revolutionaries.
This is a very interesting time of which I was keen to learn more and
the book is written with an obvious (sometimes a little over-obvious)
depth of knowledge. Robert Olen Butler creates a fine sense of the
time and place, but I’m afraid I became very bored and eventually
gave up after about 200 pages.
The problem is that
the whole thing reads rather like a history book set as an exercise
in Fine Writing. It is very, very slow; I don’t mind that of
itself, but there is an air of self-indulgence in the long, crafted
descriptions and the digressions, which are many. The first part of
the book is heavily laced with a lot of irrelevant, tedious and
sometimes downright pretentious stuff about his mother and his
childhood, for example. The story develops very slowly among this
and a wealth of very lengthy description and exposition. Just as a
tiny example, when Cobb is on a Mexican train:
“I slept,
fitfully, awaking to undifferentiated blackness out the window and to
the sound of snoring and dream murmurings in Spanish and to the smell
of cigarette smoke and pulque and to the smell of old sweat and the
Mexicans’ heavy cover-up of soap and perfume, manufactured smells
of lilac and rose and jasmine, and I woke to an ache in the side of
my neck from the sleeping angle of my head and the ache in my butt
and in my back from the rush-work seat.”
This is very good in
its way, but when every tiny thing like dozing and waking up on a
train is given this wealth of description it really does get a bit
much. The final straw for me was when Cobb was drinking with a
mercenary in bandit country, trying to determine what is going on and
as he takes a sip we get several pages of Proustian recollections of
the childhood smell of liquorice. Enough.
This was not for me,
in the end. It’s beautifully written but I found it self-indulgent
and dull.
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