The Crimes of Hector Tomás, the sprawling debut novel by Halifax author Ian Colford, explores one young man’s coming of age in a nation under the siege of military rule. Using precise and engaging language, the book examines the implications of physical and psychological subjugation in the lives of several characters — the titular Hector, his girlfriend Nadia and his father Enrique. In the midst of increasingly violent civil unrest and a tense and unstable home life, the meanings of masculinity and sexuality are repeatedly thrown into question for Hector as he takes a journey far from home through no will of his own.
The South American country in which The Crimes of Hector Tomás is set is never specified and deliberately kept vague, though it seems to bear the greatest resemblance to Chile. Colford, also author of the award-winning collection of linked short stories Evidence, is less concerned with historical veracity and more with setting an appropriate backdrop to explore his thematic concerns. These are complex and varied, ranging from the relationship between the individual and the state, to the notion of displacement and how individuals respond to the experience of trauma.
Hector is one of seven children born in the city referred to only as B__________ to Enrique, an academic, and Lucinda, a woman half his age whom he met when he hired her as his teenaged housekeeper. As Enrique tires of his wife’s charms, he pursues a sexual interest in male youths, sometimes securing access to them by paying a stipend to needy parents. As a teenager, Hector discovers this and it doesn’t sit well with him; he follows his father’s young lover Jorge home and beats him savagely.
For this, Hector is sent away to the rural province of Envigado to stay with a pair of Methuselahean relatives, ostensibly to avoid police scrutiny. Of course father Enrique is also trying to bury the issue of his sexual dalliances — but the fear of disproportionate disciplinary action against his son is legitimate. Older sibling Carlos vanished not too much earlier after a brief involvement with counter-government forces. As the story progresses, such disappearances become increasingly common.
Hector’s girlfriend Nadia, who was with him when Hector confronted his father about his juvenile paramour, knows herself what it’s like to be different. Her family’s from Poland, having moved all the way to South America for reasons that are initially obscured. When her relatives vanish, this triggers an immersion into revolutionary politics. But she doesn’t predict how serious — and bloody — the actions of her subversive cell will get. Meanwhile, Hector tries to get back home to her. For different reasons, each of them ends up in the hands of military forces, subjected to brutal psychological and physical torture that Colford details in full.
Hector emerges from boyhood surrounded by fairly unconventional male role models, starting with his father, whose sexual identity disgusts and confuses his son. In opposition to the perceived homo/hetero divide so prominent in much western culture, Enrique Tomás finds both genders arousing, eroticizing youthfulness above all. After Hector’s banishment, Enrique expresses erotic longing — shot through with guilt and shame — for his son’s teenaged girlfriend Nadia. At one point in his travels, Hector is apprehended and accused of complicity in a terrorist train bombing. The efforts to extract a confession are spearheaded by a general named Dmitri who, the reader learns, is sexually aroused by the tortures that he performs on Hector.
All this is emblematic of a complex sort of mirroring in which Colford engages — teenaged Hector brutalizes his father’s object of affection, who is younger than Hector himself, and then Hector is eventually tortured by an older man who covertly derives sexual pleasure from the act. What makes this so effective and thought-provoking is an admirable demonstration of authorial restraint. The prose is detailed, yet spare and subtle — allowing graphic and frequently disturbing events to imprint upon each reader based upon his or her own scruples and worldview.
To his great credit, Colford provides more ethical questions than answers over the course of The Crimes of Hector Tomás. It’s plain what our culture’s dominant moral codes would have to say about the personae involved — Enrique is a deplorable pedophile, Dmitri is a power-abusing pervert. But the author carefully eschews overt manipulation of the reader’s sympathies, which is probably why this book is with a smaller but reputable literary press rather than one of this country’s ever-merging publishing juggernauts.
At over four hundred pages, this novel is a long read — and for me, it ends in an unfulfilling manner. After sustaining a well-oiled and engaging plot and paranoid, moody atmosphere for so long, much of the book’s final sections are told from the points of view of secondary characters in whom the reader has developed little investment, lending an unexpected and deflating sense of detachment. The narrative seems to drive toward a particular turn of events, and in the end something very different happens. I’m glad on some levels that Colford confounded expectations regarding tidy plot resolution. But the act that wraps the novel feels unearned and unsatisfying.
Yet perhaps not unlike life itself, from start to finish The Crimes of Hector Tomás features personalities and events that will not be to everyone’s liking and succeed more than anything at the establishment of a sustained sensation of disquiet. At the best of times and also the worst, we live to be continually unsettled rather than lulled into complacency. This is one of the reasons we read as well. From this perspective, The Crimes of Hector Tomás absolutely does not disappoint.
Freehand | 416 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN #78-1554811090
‘The Crimes of Hector Tomás’ by Ian Colford
Book Reviews
The Crimes of Hector Tomás, the sprawling debut novel by Halifax author Ian Colford, explores one young man’s coming of age in a nation under the siege of military rule. Using precise and engaging language, the book examines the implications of physical and psychological subjugation in the lives of several characters — the titular Hector, his girlfriend Nadia and his father Enrique. In the midst of increasingly violent civil unrest and a tense and unstable home life, the meanings of masculinity and sexuality are repeatedly thrown into question for Hector as he takes a journey far from home through no will of his own.
The South American country in which The Crimes of Hector Tomás is set is never specified and deliberately kept vague, though it seems to bear the greatest resemblance to Chile. Colford, also author of the award-winning collection of linked short stories Evidence, is less concerned with historical veracity and more with setting an appropriate backdrop to explore his thematic concerns. These are complex and varied, ranging from the relationship between the individual and the state, to the notion of displacement and how individuals respond to the experience of trauma.
Hector is one of seven children born in the city referred to only as B__________ to Enrique, an academic, and Lucinda, a woman half his age whom he met when he hired her as his teenaged housekeeper. As Enrique tires of his wife’s charms, he pursues a sexual interest in male youths, sometimes securing access to them by paying a stipend to needy parents. As a teenager, Hector discovers this and it doesn’t sit well with him; he follows his father’s young lover Jorge home and beats him savagely.
For this, Hector is sent away to the rural province of Envigado to stay with a pair of Methuselahean relatives, ostensibly to avoid police scrutiny. Of course father Enrique is also trying to bury the issue of his sexual dalliances — but the fear of disproportionate disciplinary action against his son is legitimate. Older sibling Carlos vanished not too much earlier after a brief involvement with counter-government forces. As the story progresses, such disappearances become increasingly common.
Hector’s girlfriend Nadia, who was with him when Hector confronted his father about his juvenile paramour, knows herself what it’s like to be different. Her family’s from Poland, having moved all the way to South America for reasons that are initially obscured. When her relatives vanish, this triggers an immersion into revolutionary politics. But she doesn’t predict how serious — and bloody — the actions of her subversive cell will get. Meanwhile, Hector tries to get back home to her. For different reasons, each of them ends up in the hands of military forces, subjected to brutal psychological and physical torture that Colford details in full.
Hector emerges from boyhood surrounded by fairly unconventional male role models, starting with his father, whose sexual identity disgusts and confuses his son. In opposition to the perceived homo/hetero divide so prominent in much western culture, Enrique Tomás finds both genders arousing, eroticizing youthfulness above all. After Hector’s banishment, Enrique expresses erotic longing — shot through with guilt and shame — for his son’s teenaged girlfriend Nadia. At one point in his travels, Hector is apprehended and accused of complicity in a terrorist train bombing. The efforts to extract a confession are spearheaded by a general named Dmitri who, the reader learns, is sexually aroused by the tortures that he performs on Hector.
All this is emblematic of a complex sort of mirroring in which Colford engages — teenaged Hector brutalizes his father’s object of affection, who is younger than Hector himself, and then Hector is eventually tortured by an older man who covertly derives sexual pleasure from the act. What makes this so effective and thought-provoking is an admirable demonstration of authorial restraint. The prose is detailed, yet spare and subtle — allowing graphic and frequently disturbing events to imprint upon each reader based upon his or her own scruples and worldview.
To his great credit, Colford provides more ethical questions than answers over the course of The Crimes of Hector Tomás. It’s plain what our culture’s dominant moral codes would have to say about the personae involved — Enrique is a deplorable pedophile, Dmitri is a power-abusing pervert. But the author carefully eschews overt manipulation of the reader’s sympathies, which is probably why this book is with a smaller but reputable literary press rather than one of this country’s ever-merging publishing juggernauts.
At over four hundred pages, this novel is a long read — and for me, it ends in an unfulfilling manner. After sustaining a well-oiled and engaging plot and paranoid, moody atmosphere for so long, much of the book’s final sections are told from the points of view of secondary characters in whom the reader has developed little investment, lending an unexpected and deflating sense of detachment. The narrative seems to drive toward a particular turn of events, and in the end something very different happens. I’m glad on some levels that Colford confounded expectations regarding tidy plot resolution. But the act that wraps the novel feels unearned and unsatisfying.
Yet perhaps not unlike life itself, from start to finish The Crimes of Hector Tomás features personalities and events that will not be to everyone’s liking and succeed more than anything at the establishment of a sustained sensation of disquiet. At the best of times and also the worst, we live to be continually unsettled rather than lulled into complacency. This is one of the reasons we read as well. From this perspective, The Crimes of Hector Tomás absolutely does not disappoint.
Freehand | 416 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN #78-1554811090