As the world turns

IN his latest novel, Carlos Fuentes flashes forward -- using literary conventions of the 18th century -- to construct an epistolary novel that chronicles a tumultuous Mexican future. In the 2020s, the U.S. government, headed by President Condoleezza Rice, orchestrates an embargo against Mexico that cuts off the country’s access to satellites and every other form of communication technology. In the absence of telephones and the Internet, the characters of Fuentes’ novel vie for the Mexican presidency, recording their affairs and political maneuverings with ink and paper and relying on hand deliveries as their only means of transmission.

The initial impression, and the one the jacket copy wants the reader to believe, is that this is a political novel. Fuentes’ conceit isolates Mexico from the rest of the world and focuses on the presidential palace and the contest for the Eagle’s Throne, which is what the presidential seat is called. Fuentes is primed to wax prophetic about the approaching political dystopia, critique Mexico’s political corruption and lament Latin America’s dependency on the United States.

Mexico is reliant on the United States for e-mail and long-distance calls, and, as one of the ranting characters of the novel points out, America also threatens even the rudiments of its national identity: “The gringos, son, the gringos who’ve sucked the brains out of Mexico’s youth. They dress like gringos, dance like gringos, think like gringos -- they wish they could be gringos.”

But it’s not just the teenagers who borrow from their American neighbors. Former president Cesar Leon, who was elected in 2006, aspires to be the “best ex-president ever, a Mexican Jimmy Carter.” Tacito de la Canal, the fawning chief of staff, demonstrates what is described as a Nixonian predilection to document and archive the most incriminating of evidence. Even Yankee fraud is preferred over the domestic variety, as Enron inspires a sister pyramid scheme called “MEXEN.”

But the dummy companies, concerns over political legacies and coup attempts serve only as a backdrop. Fuentes’ political melodrama is certainly homegrown; it owes more to native telenovelas than to imported Washington mythologies. The story is propelled by love affairs, betrayals and a slew of double identities. As such, it is a novel of intrigue and suspense whose overblown characters teeter at the edge of satire. The actors of this novel do not aspire to be nuanced and rounded; instead, they want to reflect the corrosive effects that a maligned political system has on its players. This is not a novel that values its protagonists, but one that seeks to explore the culture of the presidential palace.

The inhabitants of “The Eagle’s Throne” are archetypes who surrender depth to serve a plot that twists and turns at breakneck speed. Once the reader concedes to that velocity, the novel becomes a farcical page-turner that delights in the most improbable of discoveries while skewering the ruling oligarchy.

Characters speak in political maxims, invoking Machiavelli and using chess metaphors to discuss their strategies and world visions, all while recklessly throwing their bodies and allegiances into each other’s beds. Politics and sex become entangled, and the erotic and the realpolitik become one and the same. As explained by Maria del Rosario Galvan, the seductress who grooms a green but ambitious Nicolas Valdivia for the presidency, “Political fortune ... is one very long orgasm, my darling. Success must be gradual and slow in coming if it is to endure. A prolonged orgasm, my sweet.” This sort of salacious talk is peppered throughout, and, as lovers become estranged, the dirty talk changes from seductive to violent and threatening.

“The Eagle’s Throne” is a lively chronicle of the escapades of careerist politicos, but its polemic posturing often interferes with the novel’s flowery prose and intricate plot. Sincere political asides, condemning the Bush presidency along with Mexico’s current administration, seem to be coming from Fuentes the newspaper editorialist, not Fuentes the novelist.

Still, one is willing to accept the didactic indulgences and political caricatures in the service of satire, but Fuentes’ intentions are not always clear. At a critical juncture, he pulls at the strings of pathos, not satire. He employs a child afflicted with Down syndrome, locks him up in a darkened room and ties his hands behind his back. The child, in an instance of Houdini-meets-”Flowers for Algernon,” manages to escape his restraints and writes his epistle. Using only lowercase and no periods or commas, but adeptly using parentheses and apostrophes, he writes in his blue notebook: “i used to play hide-and-seek now they lock me up in a dark room what did i do what did i what did i do i don’t know i feel my head spin even though i don’t move i am alone in a dark room and i say i am nice to plants and the animals and the trees i love.... “

Unlike the other characters, the child is one of the few who truly honors the tradition of the epistolary novel. There are no intermediaries between the child and the reader -- the master narrator is absent and the reader is granted greater intimacy with the character. Fuentes, in choosing the letters as a literary form, wants the immediacy between characters and reader, but he is unwilling to fully commit to the constraints of the epistolary novel. Within the body of the letters, he often resorts to long expository passages, his characters constantly recapitulate events that the recipients should presumably already know, and at several points he resorts to inserting documents within documents. Beyond these formal technicalities, it is the tone that ultimately undermines the authenticity of these letters. They are suspiciously written as if they were anticipating a third reader.

Nevertheless, Fuentes manages to conjure the old maestro magic. “The Eagle’s Throne” is an absorbing novel that weaves in and out of the minds of a dozen characters with a virtuosic display of ventriloquism. Like the characters, the story is troubled and inconsistent but ambitious in its aim.