Synopsis
A lot of Americans vanish into Bolivia. Being a professional magician, Jonathan was just especially good at it. He had come, convinced that its fantastic mountain deserts and mythic Indian cultures infused the place with actual magic - the real thing - in contrast to North America, which had been emptied of it.
Worried about his mental state, his straitlaced sister has arrived from the States to find him. She enlists the help of a stranded American named Roger who speaks Spanish and the Aymara Indian dialect, and they set out together.
Roger learns that her brother used to perform in public, that he subsists on fruit juice and dope, and that the locals have taken to calling him Flame. Unlike her brother, Roger is desperate to leave. He has done 23 countries in 10 years and is feeling fragile: "a candle burning low ... Any unnecessary excitement just might blow it out." Unfortunately, Flame has given up street performance to be the private entertainment for an immensely wealthy criminal oligarch with his own all too exciting talents for making things disappear.
Reviews
A burnt-out American doper, fresh from a Bolivian prison, starts out conning a naive social worker by helping her find her magician brother--and ends up conducting her on a tour of the hell that is the coca trade, while gradually recovering his humanity. Ringing new changes on the legacy of Chandler and Traven, this first novel by Jacobs (stories: A Cast of Spaniards, not reviewed), a longtime foreign-service functionary, matches noirish Roger, the Stone Cowboy, whose drug abuse has shorted out body and soul, with Agnes, a prissy Yankee social worker who's come in search of her magician brother Jonathan, now the pet of a major cocaine dealer. Narrating in the louche voice familiar to drug writers from Robert Stone to Jay McInerney, Roger takes Agnes backstage in the so- called war on drugs. Of course, the only way to get to Jonathan-- who seems to be seeking the real magic that fled North America with the coming of the Industrial Revolution--is to descend, and so our odd couple will hear Zen wisdom from the mouths of peasants, go for a wild ride with a mad revolutionary radio-broadcaster, work as forced laborers smashing coca leaves in a jungle pit for a vicious middleman, undergo interrogation and beatings by DEA henchmen--and finally travel with the brother and the druglord to the top of an Andean peak, where the last real magician lives. There, Jonathan will get his wish (he becomes a bird as the druglord executes him), and, like the Cowardly Lion, Roger will get to ask the god La Pachamama for his own wish: ``Give me back my heart.'' An unusual love story, to say the least--a little bit as if The African Queen were mixed with Panic in Needle Park--and an impressive debut from a writer with a generous imagination and a daring, if deeply weird, sense of character and fate. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Roger is being released from a Bolivian prison and would like to return to Flint, Michigan, but first he needs money. He becomes a guide and translator for Agnes, who has come to Bolivia to find her brother, Jonathan, a professional magician. While searching for the magic that is dead in the United States, Jonathan has taken the name Flame and is now playing Rasputin to one of Bolivia's most powerful drug lords. The trail leads Roger and Agnes through Bolivia's cocaine industry to the Chapare valley, where cocoa leaves are grown and stomped into paste. In its depiction of the disastrous effects of the drug war on Bolivia, this first novel by short story writer Jacobs's (A Cast of Spaniards, LJ 11/15/94) is essential reading for anyone attempting to understand the human side of our drug policies. Roger, like Flame, is searching for his own magic, making this a multilayered tale of spiritual renewal. Recommended.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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