Books: The Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Drug traffic jam

By John Ziebell

Teresa Mendoza, the heroine of Arturo Perez-Reverte's new novel The Queen of the South, is shaving her legs when a phone rings to confirm that her lover, GŸero Davila, is dead. It's no surprise; GŸero, a Sinaloan drug smuggler, had defined this inevitability as The Situation, that moment which comes to everyone in the life when the life catches up with them.

"Living forever didn't interest him particularly," Teresa reflects.

Her thoughts echo a piquant northern Mexican code that embraces revenge, responsibility and an odd sort of honor, an ethos expressed in corridos, popular folk ballads that immortalize the local outlaws, perhaps the only way possible, as contemporary knights of the realm. Teresa is a morra--the high-maintenance girlfriends of the narcos, as the Mexican drug runners call themselves--but she's got the survival instincts of a scorpion. She scuttles barefoot into the dirty streets bound for the south of Spain, only to return home a decade later, in the way such characters are wont to do, as a millionaire running a smuggling empire out of Gibraltar.

Narcotics trafficking seems a strange departure for Perez-Reverte, a guy who's written fascinating novels about some fairly arcane subjects: books, paintings, fencing, the Catholic Church. That's okay; it certainly succeeds. The book is a thriller of sorts, sure, but it's still more about characters than action. The author has always been fastidious about details, and that's true here as well; finish this book and there won't be much you don't know about running dope in the western Mediterranean.

Fast cars, expensive clothes, lots of cigarettes...remember all the trappings of the cocaine culture? It's kind of fun to see people smoke and swear and enjoy rich food; they might be fictional, but they're believable. They also have problems. As Teresa moves from waiting tables to smuggling to jail to smuggling again, she strives constantly to stay half a step ahead of everyone in a world where it's hard to tell who can do more damage, friends or enemies.

"Overconfidence kills more people than bullets," the Queen says, and it's true; she's an island of resilience, but lives spin out of control all around her. Teresa takes as many lessons from books as from prison life; she learns more from her men than they do from her, which has something to do with why she keeps outliving them. The only thing that could possibly bring her down now, we start to think, is this strange bond she still feels for the dusty Mexican landscape, her undiminished investment in a mythical philosophy spawned by live songs about dead drug runners...yeah, and we're not too shocked when it happens, either.

The novel is more sophisticated--and rewarding--than it might sound. Perez-Reverte, who likes a touch of homage, provides obvious parallels to The Count of Monte Cristo, Teresa's favorite book. He's also captivated by the romance of The Sea--bad weather, rugged individuals who chart their own courses, boats in the night, the tang of salt and danger in the air--pretty much everything Joseph Conrad bowed to a century ago. And like Conrad, he uses a wandering first-person narrator to draw the story together, an unnamed Marlow who speaks with the soldiers, crooked politicians, drug lords and fringe players who both add credibility and provide a structural shorthand for a narrative that might otherwise grow unwieldy.

Lastly, as much as we're rooting for Teresa, a drug smuggler makes an odd protagonist when we consider what society--or at least the U.S. government--finds reprehensible.

"Gringos want to ride," one narco states simply. "I saddle the horses for them."

That's a message that seems pretty clear to everyone but us--or at least those among us who insist on blaming our national problem with drugs on everything except our national desire to consume them.