Harsh Times by Mario Vargas Llosa review – CIA secrets and breathtaking lies

The Nobel laureate's tale of a coup in 1950s Guatemala speaks to our times

This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then ... oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company.

I should not have doubted a master. Now 85, Mario Vargas Llosa has won numerous literary prizes, from the Nobel down. He ran for president of Peru in 1990 and has a serious claim to be the pre-eminent Latin American writer of his generation. He has written myriad plays, novels, much journalism and nonfiction. In many ways, he is the embodiment of what a great novelist should be: unafraid to write panoptic political novels about the fate of nations and the clash of political ideologies; intellectually capable of encompassing such scope; artistically skilful enough to suffuse it with resonance, torque and drama; and all of this without losing the immersive kinesis of individual stories taken from all points on the compass of the human character.