The VICE Guide to Travel was a major revelation for me. Shane Smith traveled a world I had never seen before, that was never discussed in media. He hung out with a demented warlord in Liberia, visited North Korean slave camps in Siberia, chronicled the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi in Syria and the subsequent civil unrest, nothing seems too extreme for him. Smith was asked by an interviewer where was he the most scared. One of his answers was Mexico. Why Mexico? What is there to be afraid about in one of the world's most popular resort destination? Author Christopher Irvin understands why Shane Smith was afraid in Mexico. His novella FEDERALES draws a grim portrait of a country caught in the stranglehold of the powerful drug cartels. It is about the Mexico that exists on the other side of your resorts' barriers and it might make you think twice about booking that vacation you were so excited to take.
Marcos Camarena is one of the ''federales'', a Mexican federal police agent who declared war on the drug cartels. Marcos is conscious that he surrendered his life to his job. When his wife walks out and the job becomes too dangerous for him, he retreats to a friend's house in the middle of nohwere. After a couple weeks, he is found and recruited to work security by Eva Santos, a cartel survivor turned politician and symbol of the resilient Mexican spirit. Guided by the strength of his vocation, Marcos accepts the offer and signs up for an underfunded, understaffed and dangerous political campaign where there is danger at doing anything. Marcos failed at protecting his country, but can he protect one person?
FEDERALES is a political novella. It might seem strange coming from an American writer living in Boston, but I don't think it makes sense without the context of a political reading. Seen from a global politics perspective, FEDERALES is part fascination for the cartoonishly brutal, faceless and tentacular organizations that wage war on the very country they live in and part whistleblowing on a hopeless situation most people north of Mexican flat out refuse to acknowledge. FEDERALES hits quite hard in that regards. It's a bleak and hopeless novella about a war we're deliberately turning our back to. It's not sanctimonious or didactic in any way, it simply exposes a terrible situation under the thin veil of fiction.
So I believe that FEDERALES is important, but is it good? My main complaint about Christopher Irvin's debut novella is not about content, but about the form. It's actually pretty clever, but it's bite-sized. The story kicks off slowly, giving a good sense of who Marcos and Eva are, yet stomps on the breaks and does an awesome 180 degrees turn at some point (I'm not telling you when or how, that would be spoiling) and goes into an unexpected direction, giving the lingering paranoia of the opening pages some legs. My issue was that FEDERALES does not exploit its good ideas enough. It does things by the book for a while, they goes off-track and becomes wild and fun and then it's over. I'm aware it's a hundred pages novella, that it's supposed to be bite-sized, but it had the fuel to go at least 50% further (at LEAST), so while I marveled at Christopher Irvin's creativity, FEDERALES left me a tad frustrated. I wish Irvin would've swung for the fences on this one.
So FEDERALES is both good AND important. It could have been GREAT and important, though. I can't say it's achieving its full potential and making full use of the haunting backdrop it describes so well, but it achieves the goals it sets for itself: illustrating the unspoken Mexican civil war between the federales and the drug cartels. It does so beautifully. So as a political statement, FEDERALES says what Christopher Irvin meant it to say, but as a story, I can't help but think it could've been told louder. I prefer bite-sized entertainment to an overdose of hollow guns and dope, though, so restraint is the lesser of two evils, I suppose. There are several reasons why you should read FEDERALES: feeling the paranoia of Mexican people, understand the hopelessness of the situation, if you're missing BREAKING BAD, etc. Christopher Irvin is an intriguing talent who thrives in understatement and precision of purpose. His authorial voice has enough volume to speak louder, though. It's a good first offering, yet I'm ready for second course!