Death and the dictator

Mario Vargas Llosa's marvellous new novel, The Feast of the Goat, is set in the Dominican Republic during the infamous 1930-61 Trujillo regime. A dictator in the megalomaniac lineage of Tamburlaine (and about as cruel), Rafael Trujillo plundered the government coffers and put his family in power.

At first glance, this book seems to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. It quickly gets under way, though, and intensifies round Trujillo's longed-for assassination in 1961. The Feast of the Goat, with its blend of documentary sources and invention, is a fine addition to that well-worn genre, the Latin American "dictator novel".

In the three decades of his misrule, Trujillo's ambition was to transform the Dominican Republic from the battered pauper of the Americas into a modern industrialised state. At all costs, it had to be wealthier and less voodoo-ridden than its rival neighbour, Haiti. Ever paranoid, Trujillo executed Cabinet members and stripped loyal functionaries of their privilege. One such bewildered soul, invented by Vargas Llosa, is Senator Cabral.

A trusted and hardworking Trujillista, Cabral is publicly accused of misman-aging public funds. Yet, despite his sub-sequent hounding and humiliation, he retains a dog-like devotion to the Chief. And in a loathsome attempt to win back presidential favour, he arranges for his teenage daughter to be ritually deflowered by Trujillo. On a tropical night, the dictator brutalises the unsuspecting Uranita, before expelling her, terrified and bleeding, on to the street. As matters turn out, her father is not restored to favour. Can he ever atone for his daughter's debasement? This is the ghastly theme of The Feast of the Goat.

Thirty years after her rape, the expatriate Uranita returns to the Dominican Republic to confront her father, now in an old people's home. Her visceral loathing for him and all things Trujillonian marks the narrative powerfully. In precisely modulated prose, Vargas Llosa vividly captures the machista environment, the listless indolence of Trujillo and his cohorts. I found myself flinching from his more graphic descriptions of the torture meted out to those involved in the assassination attempt. Conspirators who were lucky enough to escape to neighbouring Haiti could avoid a sadist's castration with nail scissors - or worse. Though compelling, this novel is not for the faint-hearted.

As well as a documentary, The Feast of the Goat provides a geography lesson of sorts. The Dominican Republic must be the only island today, apart from Cyprus, divided into two independent states, each of them, moreover, speaking a different language (French in Haiti, Spanish in the DR). Trujillo's contempt for the "backward and dirty" Haitians is amply chronicled here. To earn a crust, Haitians have traditionally worked for abysmally low wages in the Dominican sugar industry. In October 1937, during a racialist purge of the sugar plantations, Trujillo's Guardia Nacional massacred some 25,000 Haitian immigrant cane-cutters. This was a Caribbean atrocity that has echoed dreadfully down the generations, says Vargas Llosa. Naturally, Trujillo tried to conceal the extent of the bloodbath, just as he tried to hide from the world the truth of his sexual depredations.

Vargas Llosa (who, incidentally, ran for president in 1990 in his native Peru) has often been maligned as a conservative force within South American writing. Yet, with this new novel, he can take his place alongside the Mexican Carlos Fuentes and the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez as a Latin with a civic conscience. The Feast of the Goat is an exceptionally powerful work of literature.

Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi is published by Hutchinson.