Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Book Review: Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia


Note:  For the first time in a long time in this blog, the below review is not of a SciFi or Fantasy novel - it's a crime novel instead (although I'd argue that genre classification).  Fair Warning to anyone who comes to this blog for the usual, but I do occasionally read other things.

Untamed Shore is a recent novel by Mexican-Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, an author who has (as I've mentioned before) become one of my favorites.  Moreno-Garcia's work has mainly consisted of genre work, but it has been genre work that covers a wide arrange of subgenres - from barely fantastical romance to vampires in dystopian Mexico to the magic of music and growing up to aztec gods.....etc.  So it's no surprise that she would branch out completely into a non-genre novel, as she did earlier in 2020 with this novel, Untamed Shore (she also wrote a horror/fantasy novel this year in Mexican Gothic), which keeps her trend of setting novels in Mexico, but switches the genre from SF/F to that of a "crime novel."

And while I'm not sure that "crime novel" or even "thriller" is a good description of this novel, Untamed Shore is still a hell of a story.  Taking bits of the crime novel and noir genres (noir is explicitly referenced at one point), it tells the story of a young woman in a small town in 1979 Baja California who wants nothing more than to get away from a place where her only options are seemingly to marry and settle down - and who in the process gets involved with three foreigners (Americans) who bring trouble.  It's a fascinating story with a really strong main character who is easy to emphasize with and which starts out on a predictable path but then takes a number of very surprising turns through the end.  In short, like pretty much everything of Moreno-Garcia's work that I've read, Untamed Shore is excellent and well worth your time, even if it's not quite genre.

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Viridiana doesn't fit in her small town of Desengaño, located in Baja California in 1979.  Her city-born father left her and the town when she was 3, and since then her mother - born to the town and firmly a part of it - has treated her like an extra nuisance, someone who should get married to the son of the other shopkeeper as the two mothers have once planned.  But Viridiana looks out upon the dull town - where fisherman catch sharks for little reason anymore other than they always did so and there's nothing else to do - and wants more.  She may not want to be the city boy her father supposedly was, but she knows there has to be something more out there for her - a young woman fluent in four languages and who dreams of the few books and movies she has seen.

And so when three American tourists - an older man, his young wife, and the wife's handsome young brother - arrive in town to rent a house, Viridiana is more than willing to take a job acting as the old man's translator and transcriber.  After all, surely it'd be more interesting than another dead end summer in a town where everyone seems to think her spoiled, acting as a tour guide to any wandering tourists, even if she would have to live in the same house as the strangers.  But as the days go on, Viridiana finds herself oddly fascinated by the younger two Americans, the sometimes ice/sometimes fire personality of wife Daisy and the handsome and suave Gregory, and finds herself wondering if they could somehow lead to her escape from the monotony of Desengaño.  But when one of the Americans winds up dead, Viridiana discovers that the foreigners may not be the ideal that they seemed on the surface, and that to escape through them will require her to make some very difficult decisions.....
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Untamed Shore is marketed as a "crime novel" or "thriller" set in Mexico, and I have some quibbles with that classification.  I tend to think of thrillers as having moments of breakneck pacing, where our protagonists have to deal with quick changes in situation that threaten them direly - and there really isn't any of that here (this novel is not quick paced).  As for being a crime novel - yes there is a potential crime that occurs in this novel around the 40% of the way mark, which changes the path of events.  And yet, the crime isn't really the focus of the novel - Viridiana's attempt to find something in life other than the grim fate of marrying in her small town is.  This is Viridiana's story as she attempts to find something in the foreigners that is new - something like the stories or movies she's read and dreamed about - and how she deals with events and people who don't turn out to be what she expected.  She's the focus, not any crime or thrills, even if the setting does grow increasingly crime focused as the novel goes on.

And Viridiana is a very very likable protagonist and she absolutely carries this novel.  Viridiana is a classic archetype at first - a very real archetype mind you, but one that is pretty common in literature - in that she's a young woman stuck in a town with no options for a future, bound by expectations of her sex and her birth that are beyond her control.  And because she's attempted to take back some control - by refusing the course towards marriage to the son of the local shopkeeper - she is shunned by both her mother and the rest of the town, and treated as spoiled by everyone except the eccentric old man who deals with foreigners.  As someone who's never left the town, she's a bit naive as to realities outside of it - relying upon books and movies for further context - but - and this is key - as someone who is highly intelligent, it doesn't take her long to figure out when her dreams don't quite match reality (the reader will figure it out first, but it doesn't take frustratingly long for her to follow along).  And so Viridiana doesn't quite fit the stereotype one might have expected, of someone who could be taken fully for a ride by the clearly not on the level foreigners she finds herself among in this novel, who will have either bad things happen to her or will have to make serious compromises to do good.

Because doing good is not really what Viridiana cares about.  She wants something for herself, and while she's not willing to do anything to get it - her refusal to perform certain sex acts (yeah those are part of the book, although nothing nonconsenual is), even as she distastefully does others; her refusal to shut up at times when others are doing things she thinks aren't safe; etc. - but she has no absolute interest in being a do gooder in a society that has basically made her life miserable.  And so, with escape as her main focus, she's willing to do some things that are distasteful and not quite ethical if it can help her manage it, and while she might be a bit blinded to reality by the needs of escape, she's quick on the uptake to change her plans when she realizes truths.  She's inquisitive, but no mystery solver, she just is aiming for freedom even as the situation becomes more and more complicated.

This works really well as the plot starts off rather slowly and speeds up just a bit towards the end of this not too long novel.  It never actually moves fast mind you - the death I mention in the plot summary comes about 40% of the way through, and things don't move much faster afterwards, but the final act does speed up nicely to a fascinating conclusion, in which our heroine manages to cut through both the bullshit of the other characters and the sexism inherent in the setting to get what she wants.  There isn't a Happily Ever After here - it's not that type of book - but there's a resolution that's immensely satisfying as a capper on Viridiana's journey, and fits perfectly the realism of the tone.  I'll note that there's certainly a lot of symbolism in how the town basically works in this novel as well, which you could write a lot about, but I'm skipping over here for the sake of keeping this review a reasonable length.

Anyhow, Untamed Shore is a fascinating novel that I did not mind taking a break from genre reading to follow.  As I've said before all of Silvia Moreno-Garcia's works are well worth your time for their fascinating characters and plots that go in directions you wouldn't expect, and this is no different.
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