Brutal process

Giles Blunt talks about the challenges
of fictionalizing torture in his latest
novel Breaking Lorca

by JULIET WATERS

Giles Blunt found himself last week at Blue Metropolis with a different audience than he’s used to. “Usually I get crime fiction fans,” says the internationally respected Canadian mystery writer. But the night he read in Montreal, “there were people in the audience from Amnesty International.”

In many ways this was probably a more appropriate audience for the serious themes of Breaking Lorca, a novel set in the ’80s, narrated mostly from the point of view of a man from El Salvador involved in the brutal torture of a woman he will end up pursuing many years later in New York.

Blunt’s initial inspiration for the novel was a story he read in The New York Times, back in the ’90s, when he was living in New York. “It was about an institute that had opened in Minnesota, the first one in North America devoted to the psychotherapeutic treatment of victims of torture. At first I thought that would be an interesting setting. The people you would meet there. What would they be like and how would they ever get over it?”

Blunt went to Minnesota. “They wouldn’t let me talk to the victims… but they gave me lots of good information. So I began to think about a character being in the United States and started wondering about the initial story, how they came to be tortured…” which led to more research into Central and South America.

He chose El Salvador, “Because it was one of the worst places…. They were so open about it there. Unlike Chili, where most people disappeared, El Salvador had a couple of body dumps, former tourist areas…It points to an essential thing about torture that most governments try to obscure, that it’s not about getting information. It’s about terrorizing the population. El Salvador made that very clear by not hiding torture. They tortured someone in very visible ways and dumped the horrible disfigured body in a place where people are going to have to walk through all the other horribly disfigured, decomposing bodies to find somebody they loved.”

And so we find ourselves at the beginning of Blunt’s latest novel, not in a Minnesota therapy institute, or in the U.S., or even in the mind of a victim. We find ourselves in El Salvador where the first person we meet is one of the perpetrators of a brutal process of torture that will last for the entire first 100 pages of the book. Although to what extent this repentant prison guard, Victor Pena, is also a victim is open to debate.

As the opening sentences of Breaking Lorca inform us: “Sooner or later the other soldiers in the squad were going to kill him. It was only a matter of time.” Pena has already been saved once from the firing squad. His uncle, a Captain in the military, hopes that involving him in the torture of a suspected guerrilla will toughen him up. What neither of these two men knows is how far they will have to go to break their victim, a young woman who may or may not be innocent.

Why the change of course? For all the research Blunt put into victims of torture, in the end, the storyteller won out. “A victim per se isn’t very interesting. They’re not the cause of the action. They’re not the protagonist, it’s being done to them.” But, as Blunt points out, neither are the most brutal perpetrators, who are just acting on impulse, all that interesting. “A psychopath doesn’t face any moral questions. I guess that’s the attraction of being a psychopath. That’s why you choose the career.”

In the end it’s the people facing moral questions who are the engine of the story. Torturers who might also be victims. The victims who may also be agents. And the readers who are left to wonder who they might end up being in such a time and such a place.

BREAKING LORCA BY GILES BLUNT,
RANDOM HOUSE, HC, 258 PP. $29.95