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THE BEGGAR'S OPERA
by Peggy Blair
Penguin Canada, February 2012
352 pages
$24.00 CAD
ISBN: 0143179977


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This debut novel opens on a very promising note. We are introduced to police inspector Ricardo Ramirez of the Havana police force and to a coroner, Dr Hector Apiro, a gifted diagnostician and surgeon. Both are marked by certain physical anomalies. Apiro is a dwarf, and needs to conduct his autopsies from atop a three-foot stepladder. Ramirez, yet another in a recent line of fictional detectives with peculiar neurological conditions, sees ghosts. He fears he is suffering from the same complaint that killed his grandmother, dementia with Lewy bodies, a hallucination-inducing condition that is invariably fatal. The ghosts that visit Ramirez are those of people whose deaths have recently come to the attention of the police for one reason or another and they disappear when their cases have been resolved. Apiro and Ramirez have a relaxed and warm relationship, fostered perhaps by the fact that neither is overworked, violent crime statistics being what they are in Havana.

When the body of a small boy is retrieved from the water bearing clear signs of sexual assault and violent death, it comes therefore as a greater shock than it might in some other places. On the child's body is found a wallet containing the passport of a Canadian tourist, Mike Ellis, who, we learn, has spent an extremely rocky night drinking rum and flirting with a local prostitute. He can't remember much about the evening, but is certain that he didn't kill anyone. He is taken into custody and Ramirez has seventy-two hours to gather sufficient evidence for an indictment, which, if obtained, would see Ellis dispatched to await trial in a Cuban prison where summary justice would probably ensure his death before the week is out.

Ellis' boss in Ottawa sends Celia Jones, a lawyer and ex-RCMP officer who is fluent in Spanish and married to a Cuban emigré, down to see what she can do. It is at this point that the book begins to lag a bit. Neither Ellis nor Jones are particularly interesting characters in themselves. To be effective, the stock fictional nightmare of the innocent tourist falsely accused and facing uncertain justice in a language he does not understand really requires a sympathetic victim to work; either that or an extremely deft hand at characterization. And Jones is very much out of the stock character bin - an ex-hostage negotiator haunted by a failure that ended in tragedy, a woman unable to conceive who drowns her sorrows in work, she is a familiar type.

Much of the central part of the book is punctuated by endless criticism of life in Cuba. The time is 2007 and the economy was in very rough shape, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its support, the tightening of economic sanctions by George Bush, and the toll taken by several historic hurricanes. All of the poverty and deprivation is chalked up to Fidel Castro, or so it seems from the complaints of the Cubans that Jones comes in contact with. Turning to taxi-drivers to convey a sense of how things are is a standard journalist's dodge when time is too short for real research, but it has its problems in a novel. Castro's Cuba is presented here as a unrelentingly repressive land where the slightest deviation from orthodoxy is rapidly punished. The ease with which passing Cubans vent their discontent with the regime to utter strangers rather undercuts that particular message. Havana is seen to seethe with prostitutes, beggars, and corruption at every level. To what degree this is in fact the case is unclear - the sole claim to direct knowledge of the country that Peggy Blair announces is that she and her daughter spent the Christmas holidays there six years ago.

Like many first novels, THE BEGGAR'S OPERA would have benefited from stricter editorial pruning. There are a number of twists and turns at the end, some of which are unexpected but unfortunately unconvincing and seem introduced for no particular reason except as an attempt to lob a final firework or two into the air

A second book involving Ramirez and Jones has been announced. Whether it will be set once more in Havana or in Ottawa, where Blair is more at home, remains to be seen, but Ramirez is on his way to Canada's capital at the end of the book. It will be interesting to see what he makes of it. I presume ghosts get through immigration without difficulty.

THE BEGGAR'S OPERA was shortlisted for the 2010 CWA Debut Dagger Award.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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