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Forle, narrating both after the fact, as in a report, and also from within the present action, is something of a burnt-out case. In him we recognise, among many borrowings and echoes of other authors, Graham Greene's Querry from the novel of that title.
Following the death of his wife, the paradoxical and ironic Forle has "made a false floor to fireproof myself from what feelings burned below". He takes comfort in a lover, Soledad, who with her white dress and tattered shoes is straight out of Conrad, that writer whose method Greene abandoned because he believed it had a debilitating effect on his writing. Not so with Docx, who successfully follows Conrad's Victory in allowing a trio of intruders into an apparent paradise.
One is the judge, an urbane amoralist like Jones in Conrad's novel , who is to preside over the registration of indigenous people to vote in a forthcoming election. His recipe for the good life is to "sleep with a woman whenever the opportunity arises and learn a musical instrument". The second invader is the corrupt Colonel Cordero, and the third his brutal executive, Captain Lugo.
The initial encounter with the intruders is oddly formal — "Cordero spoke to me like I were another man's choice for promotion" — but when Forle witnesses an act of torture, it becomes clear that the colonel and his men have evil intentions. As their nature is revealed, Forle begins to discover in himself a capacity for violence that will culminate, by the end of the novel, in a critical act not of heroism but of revenge. Along the way, there are many incidental satisfactions.
Some lie in Docx's expert laying out of scene after scene, but the greater art is in his refusal to dramatise or even disclose everything. For example, a passage in which Forle meets a drugs kingpin is followed, after a line break, with a bravura description of a cocaine high; it's only later, as Forle confesses to Soledad an encounter with a "cocaine girl" in a bar that one gets some sense of the intervening action.
Again the debt is to Conrad — this is the technique which the great Conradian critic Ian Watt described as "delayed decoding". The process of piecing together meaning is not just a matter for the reader, or for characters within the story making sense of phenomenological data as they receive it; it is, as well, part of a tragic vision of the human condition, relating to our need to tell stories and our inability to make them correlate across history and geography.
As the judge, who has become cynical about the possibility of genuine connection, puts it: And each man follows this story that he tells himself: No wonder he cannot resist the idea that there must be another story — that of mankind itself — of mankind's progress. But is he Satan? He has horned facial scales in the picture, so maybe he is. The Bible is more ambiguous. He's a creature, but a smart one.
In the book of Revelation, Satan is called "the ancient serpent" Revelation So in the New Testament the snake is Satan. How did a smart "creature of the field" come to be identified with the Prince of Darkness?
The answer tells us a lot about the importance of Genesis, and how people thought about it, in the early years of Judaism and Christianity. In the Genesis story, the snake plays the role of a trickster. He verbally seduces the woman into breaking God's commandment and eating from the forbidden fruit. But this crime is itself ambiguous.
It is a clear transgression of God's command, but it also makes Adam and Eve more than they were before. The snake says that the forbidden fruit will make them "like gods, knowing good and evil" Genesis 3: Knowledge "like gods" is impressive, even if it's not quite clear what this knowledge consists of. The price of this knowledge is curses and expulsion from the Garden, lest the people also become immortal by eating from the Tree of Life.
At a young age, we typically have planted in our minds the idea of the devil as a little figure in a red suit with a tail carrying a pitchfork. He is someone to fear. At a young age we typically have planted in our minds the idea of the devil as a little figure in a red suit with a tail carrying a pitchfork.
Knowledge is a boon, but its cost is very high. The snake tricked the humans into disobedience, but he wasn't lying about the benefit. Although humans are condemned to hard labor -- on the soil and in childbirth -- we have the benefit of knowledge, which somehow makes us "like gods. Life as we know it is complicated, colored by pain, mortality, knowledge and joy.
This is the Genesis story's portrait of the nature of human existence and how we got here. The snake -- because he is smart and can talk -- is an agent in this story of human transgression and change. Snakes are indeed scary and sometimes deadly, so it is not far-fetched to see this reptile as a trickster rather than, say, a sheep or a rabbit although the rabbit is a trickster in some Native American stories.