‘Guano’ by Louis Carmain

Reviewed by André Forget

For a novel that comes in at 140 fairly small pages, Québéc writer Louis Carmain’s Prix des Collégiens-winning second novel, Guano, does cover a lot of ground, historically speaking. Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins, it begins on the docks of Cadix in 1862, where Carmain promises to spin his readers “a story of love and war” before dragging his protagonist, the no-longer-young, pathologically unmotivated Simón Cristiano Claro around the world, and mixing him up in the painfully silly lead-up to the even sillier Chincha Islands War of 1864-1866.

For those readers unfamiliar with what the Spanish Empire was up to in the mid-nineteenth century, the Chincha Islands War was a minor and rather demeaning scuffle between Spain, Peru, and Chile over control of a small archipelago of rocks in the Pacific, which were of interest because the particular kind of bird shit in which they were covered was an important component in fertilizers at the time. While the conflict may not have made anyone look particularly noble or heroic, it did provide a rather irresistible set-up for any number of jokes.

It is a mark of Carmain’s intelligence as a novelist that Guano does not simply settle comfortably into mock-heroic satire of this absurd and largely forgotten war. While there is plenty of mock-heroism on display (simply rehearsing the historical facts would yield a mock-heroic novel par excellence), Carmain is too interested in the actual human factors that shape and mutilate history to be content simply making fun of them—as though we aren’t all, on some level, subject to the same flaws.

Like many historical romances—and if Guano must be fit into a category, this is the one into which it slides most easily—Guano narrates the events of the past through the eyes of fictional protagonists standing close to actual historical figures. Simon is a communications officer aboard the Triunfo, a Spanish ship under the command of Admiral Luis Hernandez Pinzón sent to the Pacific ostensibly to conduct scientific research. The real, not-very-well-disguised aim is to assert Spain’s protection of the financial interests of her citizens operating abroad in the newly-independent nations of Peru and Chile.

While conducting a diplomatic mission in the Peruvian port city of Callao, Simon meets the beautiful and mysterious Montse. Montse has a passion for psychology and time on her hands, and over the next four years they fall haltingly into something like love even as their growing passion is forced to play second string to the geopolitical posturing that eventually escalates into open war.

On a strictly narrative level, Carmain tells a familiar story (love is thwarted by politics, individuals are caught up in the forces of history, pride comes before the fall, etc.). But what makes Guano an exceptional novel—and it is an exceptional novel, in the most literal sense of the word—is its refusal to be classed by the genre in which it operates. Carmain’s manipulation of style plays a complicated game with his readers’ expectations. For example, the opening line about telling “a story of love and war” is true in a technical sense (there is a love affair and a war) even as it feels somewhat off as a description of Guano—“A story of love and war” being the kind of thing one associates more with lurid action films and self-serious World War II memoirs than with clever literary explorations of Imperial conflict.

All of this is signalled by the novel’s deceptively simple epigraph, lifted from Julien Gracq’s En lisant, en ecrivent, in which we are told that “if literature is not a collection of femme fatales and creatures on the road to ruin, it’s not worth reading.” Gracq is not exactly a household name in the English-speaking world, but to any reader familiar with his existential post-war surrealism, the epigraph serves as a kind of warning: while the wording suggests the pulpy joys of aestheticized, noirish decay, read straight it is a statement of pure nihilism. This gap—between the expectations set up by the tone of a thing and its literal content—is territory Carmain exploits masterfully.

Consider the following sentence: “Simon didn’t know it right then, but History had begun its march in front of his eyes, a bit idiotic and mad, germinating with things drunk men do or don’t do.” The imagine of history, “a bit idiotic and mad,” getting started after a Spanish Admiral and a Peruvian foreign affairs minister get loaded on Tokay and start trading insults is undeniably funny, but like a boisterous drunk on the street late at night, there is also something fucking scary about it.

The reader can enjoy the foolhardy braggadocio of Admirals Pinzón, Salazar, Pareja, and Nuñez, but Carmain never lets them forget that very real lives hang on the decisions they make, and beneath his bantering style there is an underlying current of real anger at the futility and hubris of all this deadly masculine posturing. If Carl von Clausewitz asserted that war was the continuation of politics by other means, Guano reminds us that the small-minded idiocy on such magnificent and constant display in politics gets carried over into war as well. And this idiocy is funny—or at least, we want to laugh at it. One of Carmain’s accomplishments is making us wonder if we should.

As a historical satire, Guano is in small but select company. Like Douglas Glover’s Elle and Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, it blurs genre lines and draws into sharp relief the narrative assumptions that often get made when fictionalizing the past. Like DeWitt and Glover, Carmain’s language is both rooted in the historical era to which it belongs, but also informed by a modern sensibility. In doing so, it asks serious—and destabilizing—questions about our ability to really imagine or ventriloquize a time that is not our own.

For example, Carmain sometimes makes a point of using delightfully anachronistic language, as when Peruvian general Manuel Ignacio de Vivanco’s handlebar moustache is described as being “on trend,” and his often-surprising descriptions (“The Admiral has thick eyebrows that jut out like awnings”) and turns of phrase (“The shit pervaded their hearts,” “His heart became her coffin”) seem linguistically to be undeniably of our own time.

Carmain is so obviously having fun—and so obviously having fun with the swashbuckling elements of his tale—that it would be wrong to say that Guano is straightforwardly a critique or send-up of the adventure story. It is, rather, an adventure story that has grown up and realized how problematic adventure stories are, but can’t quite bring itself to condemn them. And so Carmain dances through the grey area between satire and solemnity.

Coach House | 144 pages | $19.95 | paper | ISBN # 978-1552453155