Book #32

The House of the Scorpion
by Nancy Farmer

This was a nice one, a fast, easy, interesting read after all of these slow books I've been through. When it's taken me a week to read each of the last two books, I really need a one-day read as a pick-me-up, and that's what this was. The House of the Scorpion is a very interesting little dystopia: the drug lords of Mexico, led by one Matteo Alacran, managed to swing a deal with the US and Mexico whereby they were given the area around the border between the two countries as their own sovereign territory; in exchange, they agreed to stop completely the flow of illegal immigrants, and also promised not to sell their drugs in either nation, but go to Europe, Asia, and Africa with their product. So now, 100 years later, Matteo Alacran is still alive, owing to the fact that he keeps growing new clones of himself in order to harvest their organs. He's not unique in this, the other drug lords do the same, but what is unique is that Alacran allows his clones to retain their minds, to learn and experience life until he needs to cut them open and take their still-beating heart, so to speak. The novel is the story of the last of these clones, who goes by Matt.

The author does a nice job of portraying life as the complete outsider. She also created excellent characters for El Patron, who is the original Alacran, and Tam Lin, the IRA terrorist-cum-bodyguard who befriends little Matt. It's a nice little idea that Alacran gets his security personnel from other countries, since, as he tells Matt, that means it's harder for them to plot against him; his most recent hiring was a group of English soccer hooligans. There's also a nice idea of how the country turns the captured illegal immigrants into mindless slaves to work the fields, and I love the depiction of the Alacran family and its infighting and scandal and hatred of themselves and pretty much everyone else.

The problem, if there was any, was in Matt's escape into Mexico, now called Aztlan. Once there he gets picked up by a Communist orphanage, where the boys are taught to revere the welfare of the state at the cost of their individuality; it's a nice little story, actually, as the Keepers (the commies) are amusingly over the top with their propaganda, just as actual Communists are, and it has a good resolution when the Keepers are busted for their part in distributing illegal drugs as well as abusing the orphans in their care. The only problem with it is that there's no point to it: the book is not about Communist oppression, nor even about government corruption, other than the central idea that El Patron rules his country absolutely, likened to an Egyptian Pharaoh. I also found the ending a bit improbable, as El Patron finally dies and his empire goes into lockdown soon afterwards -- and stays there for three months. And nobody takes over. Since this is supposed to be the richest man in the world, being the number one drug lord, I refuse to accept the idea that his wealth could sit around that long, that his customers would wait that long for his product without going in, whatever security system was in place, and taking it over. It's just too long.

But these are minor complaints. It was a good book, and I'm going to thank the student who recommended it to me.