THE GENERAL of the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s new novel is Simón Bolívar, “The Liberator,” who in the years 1811–24 led the revolutionary armies of South America in a brilliant and gruelling series of campaigns that swept the Spaniards from their former colonies. In the process many rich and long-established cities were devastated, vast wealth was captured and squandered, whole populations were laid waste through slaughter, famine, and disease, and, in the aftermath, the unified South America Bolívar so fervently desired — a country that would have balanced, and challenged, the United States — fell apart in a series of jealous bickerings, intrigues, assassinations, secessions, local feuds, and military coups.
Had Bolívar not existed, Mr. García Márquez would have had to invent him. Seldom has there been a more fitting match between author and subject. Mr. García Márquez wades into his flamboyant, often improbably and ultimately tragic material with enormous gusto, heaping detail upon sensuous detail, alternating grace with horror, perfume with the stench of corruption, the elegant language of public ceremony with the vulgarity of private moments, the rationalistic clarity of Bolívar’s thought with the malarial intensity of his emotions, but tracing always the main compulsion that drives his protagonist: the longing for an independent and unified South America. This, according to Bolívar himself, is the clue to all his contradictions.
Just now, when empires are disintegrating and the political map is being radically redrawn, the subject of The General in His Labyrinth is a most timely one. It is noteworthy that Mr. García Márquez has chosen to depict his hero not in the days of his astonishing triumphs but in his last months of bitterness and frustration. One feels that, for the author, the tale of Bolívar is exemplary not just for his own turbulent age but for ours as well. Revolutions have a long history of eating their progenitors.
Each book by Mr. García Márquez is a major literary event. Each has also been quite different from its predecessors, and the new novel, ably translated by Edith Grossman, is no exception. It is set in the past, but to call it a historical novel would be to do it an injustice. Nor is it one of those fictions — such as, for instance, “A Maggot” by John Fowles — in which a few real personages are mingled with the imagined ones. In this book the element of the real is front and centre: most of the people in it actually lived; all of the events and most of the incidents actually took place, and the rest have their foundation in voluminous research: if someone eats a guava, then guavas existed, in that place and at that season.
But Mr. García Márquez avoids a chronological narrative (although, very helpfully, the linear sequence of events is provided in a note at the end). Instead he begins his book at the point at which General Bolívar, an old man at the age of forty-six, literally shrunken by the unspecified illness that will soon kill him, is rejected as president of the new government he himself has helped to create. Cold-shouldered by the elite, jeered by the rabble, he leaves the Colombian city of Bogotá for a meandering journey by barge down the Magdalena River with the stated intention of sailing to Europe.
He never makes it. Thwarted by the oppressive and calamitous weather, by the machinations of his enemies — in particular his fellow revolutionary and archrival, Francisco de Paula Santander — by the political ambitions of his friends, by his illness, and above all by his own reluctance to leave the scene of his former glories, he wanders from city to city, house to house, refuge to refuge, dragging his increasingly baffled and restless entourage in his wake. In some places he is treated with scorn, in others with veneration; he endures endless celebrations in his honour, pleas for his intercession, fiestas and official receptions, punctuated by the brutal interventions of nature — floods, heat waves, epidemics — and by fresh episodes in the decay of his own body.
Always he is dogged by a question he refuses to answer: will he recapture the presidency in order to suppress the anarchy and civil war that are threatening to tear the continent apart? In other words, is he willing to purchase unity at the expense of a rudimentary democracy, and at the price of a dictatorship headed by himself? Possibly he is waiting for the right moment to make a comeback; but this moment never arrives. “The headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams” is won by the misfortunes, and the monster at the centre of his “labyrinth” gets him in the end.
The structure of the book is itself labyrinthine, turning the narrative back on itself, twisting and confusing the thread of time until not only the general but the reader cannot tell exactly where or when he is. Woven into the present, as memory, reveries, dream, or feverish hallucination, are many scenes from the general’s earlier life: near catastrophes in war, splendid triumphs, superhuman feats of endurance, nights of orgiastic celebration, portentous turns of fate, and romantic encounters with beautiful women, of which there seem to have been a large number. There is the deeply suppressed image of his young wife, dead after eight months of marriage; there is his devoted, cigar-smoking Amazonian mistress, Manuela Sáenz, who once saved him from assassination. But there were also — according to his faithful valet, José Palacios, who plays Leporello to Bolívar’s Don Juan — thirty-five other serious affairs, “not counting the one-night birds, of course.”
Of course: because Bolívar is not only a prime exponent of the well-known Latin American machismo but a true child of the Romantic age. His political imagination was formed by the French Revolution; his heroes were Napoleon and Rousseau. Like Byron, he was a romantic ironist, a skeptic in religion, a flouter of social norms, a philanderer — a man capable of great self-sacrifice in the pursuit of large and glorious goals, but otherwise a worshipper at the altar of his own ego. He approached each new woman as a challenge; “once satisfied, he [would] . . . send them extravagant gifts to protect himself from oblivion, but, with an emotion that resembled vanity more than love, he would not commit the least part of his life to them.”
On the subject of politics, Mr. García Márquez’s Bolívar is little short of prophetic. Just before his death, he proclaims that South America “is ungovernable, the man who serves a revolution plows the sea, this nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants.” He foresees the perils of debt: “I warned Santander that whatever good we had done for the nation would be worthless if we took on debt because we would go on paying interest till the end of time. Now it’s clear: debt will destroy us in the end.” He has something to say, as well, about the role of the United States in Latin American affairs: inviting the United States to the Congress of Panama is “like inviting the cat to the mice’s fiesta.” “Don’t go . . . to the United States,” he warns a colleague. “It’s omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.” As Carlos Fuentes has remarked, the patterns of Latin American politics, and of United States intervention in them, have not changed much in 160 years.
In addition to being a fascinating literary tour de force and a moving tribute to an extraordinary man, The General in His Labyrinth is a sad commentary on the ruthlessness of the political process. Bolívar changed history, but not as much as he would have liked. There are statues of “The Liberator” all over Latin America, but in his own eyes he died defeated.