Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)
How do you feel about spoilers? Personally speaking I veer between generally relaxed and actively enthusiastic. Sometimes I look up the plot of a film before I watch it. I have been told that this is strange behaviour.
Anyway, I'm about to spoil my favourite bit of Fernanda Melchor's Hurricane Season, though two quick caveats first. One, "favourite" is absolutely not the right word, in that it has vaguely positive connotations and this is a relentlessly unforgiving, lyrically unpleasant novel. (I'm not going to quote anything particularly graphic here, but the book comes with more or less every content warning you can think of.)
Two, this is not a plot spoiler. As far as the overarching plot goes, the book spoils itself: we find out on page one that there has been a murder, that the Witch is dead, and it's only a short way into chapter one that we find out who did it. This is a technique spoiler, if that's a thing.
Here is the beginning of chapter four, which is typical of the book as a whole. Each chapter we ride along with one main character, somebody in the orbit of the Witch or her killers, and we get this tight third-person clatter of scattershot recollection. Here's Munra, the killers’ reluctant getaway driver.
Honest, honest, honest to God, he didn't see a thing, on his mother's soul, may she rest in peace, he didn't see a thing; didn't even know what those fuckers had done to her, without his crutch he was as good as stuck in the van, and besides, the kid had told him to stay put behind the wheel with the engine running, they'd be in and out in a matter of minutes, or that's what Munra had taken him to mean, and that was as much as he knew, he didn't get out for a better view or turn to look out of the open side door, and although, truth be told, he was tempted, he even resisted the urge to watch through the rear view mirror.
But then, thirty-odd pages later, this happens—
… although Munra suspected that it was the Witch herself who cursed him for snubbing her that day, and that was the one and only time he'd entered the kitchen in that house, and not because I had anything to do with that person, but for the reasons I've explained, which is that her lifestyle and appearance disgusted me, but at no point did I ever display any desire to harm that person, I didn't see a thing, I already told you, not a thing, and I didn't have a clue what had gone on, what they'd done to her, I didn't see them kill her because, well, look at me, officer, I can't even walk …
—and for less than half a page, for barely a breath, Munra's story slides into Munra's statement to the police.
Reading this in the immediate moment and the cafe up the road, I said, quite audibly, "oh fuck". And then, reading on, it gave the whole novel a clarity: that was a witness statement, but this is witnessing. One is a transaction, a negotiation between and individual and a powerful authority that renders a person small, tactical. The other creates them as they create themselves in the world and are created by the world.
Munra, when he talks to the police, when he is constructed by authority, is wheedling and small; he is concerned only with finding his way out, and so he renders himself pathetic in the hope that he will be rewarded with his freedom. He does his best to make himself as quiet a statistic as possible. But Munra, given to us by the novelist, is a mess. Doing his best, sometimes doing quite badly, broken and patched up and broken again. Coping. Surviving. Living, just about. Hanging on. This is a novel that witnesses the witnesses.
And the misery, restless and relentless, never once tips into misanthropy. This book contains some appalling persons, but it loves people fiercely and well, even as it follows them through a world that maybe hates them, as it locates them at the vortex of capital and poverty and twisted masculinity and isolation, as it breaks them. It is also sort of a true story: there was a witch killed near a village outside Veracruz, a port city in Mexico, where Melchor was working as a journalist. The original plan was for a non-fiction novel like In Cold Blood, but she abandoned that quickly. For a start, too dangerous. For an end, "I didn’t think that I could get to the heart of the crime."
In the end she doesn't strike for the heart at all; rather, she accretes everything else around it. As a metaphor, the hurricane is most useful for its eye, the spot at the heart of the tumult where a kind of peace can be found. But the hurricane season is one storm followed by another followed by another, and to live through it is to watch the maps and the clouds and the television forecasts, and to pray, and to hope that there is time enough between each storm to rebuild.