Where There Was Fire

John Manuel Arias

Pan MacMillan 2024

Review by Daniel Rey

On a particularly hot Costa Rican night in 1968, a fire burns an American-owned banana plantation. For Teresa, the mystery and trauma run deeper – it was the night her husband José María killed her mother, and disappeared.

Twenty seven years later, Teresa’s eldest daughter Lyra – estranged from her mother and bringing up the son of her sister Carmen – runs a business providing infertility counselling. She meets a former employee of the American Fruit Company, who tells her he kept a cache of documents he had been ordered to destroy. Where There Was Fire, the debut novel by John Manuel Arias, explores Lyra’s subsequent investigations into the plantation, the fire and her family story.

Arias’s writing, at a sentence level, is sumptuous – as good as the authors from the Latin American ‘Boom’ of the 1960s whose work he has clearly digested. Referring to that night in 1968, he writes that ‘sweating priests’ were ‘draped like towels over pews’. The novel’s weighty subject matter is lightened (but not reduced) by his narration: ‘To say that Carmen had spent most of her young life in tears was an understatement – Teresa and José María snickered that the rainy season started every time her face frowned.’

Gabriel García Márquez accompanies Arias like the ancestral spirits present in this novel. There’s the banana plantation, the unaccountable US conglomerate, the railway line that carries many ills, and even a character called Gabriel. The influence is also linguistic. Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) will notice Arias’s repetition of its opening phrase ‘Many years later…’, the recurring mention of memory, and the idea of ‘’second chances’. Then there’s the droll, surreal tone: ‘Time wasn’t tallied, because the priests who normally manned the belfries lay naked inside the darkness of their churches, praying for the heat to pass.’ Such sustained allusion to a grand writer is risky, and it is to Arias’s credit that the echoes don’t drown out his skill.  

Whereas description and prosody are Where There Was Fire’s great strengths, their excellence is not equalled by the novel’s pacing. Many sections – especially those set in 1995 – do little to develop a richer sense of the characters, or advance the plot. As a result, despite Arias’s virtuoso phrases, much of the story is onerous.

Arias’s novel was written in English, but has a Spanish-language sensibility. He translates some Spanish expressions literally, leaving the reader with clear but unusual phrases like ‘the hands of bananas’. He also uses the Spanish upside-down question marks and exclamation marks. These decisions help the dialogue remain faithful to his Costa Rican characters.

Many aspects of Where There Was Fire are based on historical events. In particular, the US multinational Standard Fruit (familiar to consumers today as Dole) sprayed its Costa Rican plantations with the pesticide Nemagon, which led to the sterilisation of tens of thousands of people. It is more than symbolic, then, that Lyra is an infertility counsellor. Her investigation into the past supports the victims, but it cannot end their pain.

Photo by Jose Reynaldo da Fonseca, courtesy of Wikicommons

https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/john-manuel-arias/where-there-was-fire/9781035041374

Daniel Rey

A British-Colombian writer currently based in New York City.