
This is a very
powerful and often unpleasant book. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that I
enjoyed reading it, just because it’s at times very unsettling, but I do think
it’s a brilliant book and an impressive first work. I hesitate to call it a novel
because it’s so short (just 74 pages) and there’s something in the shape of the
story makes it feel more like a novella or short story. What I really admire is
the way the child’s perspective on these darker events is handled. Such
narrative perspectives can and do work well (take, for example, To Kill a Mockingbird or The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), and
Villalobos deftly handles the divide between what Tochtli sees and understands,
and what we see and understand.
Saying that, I like
that Tochtli does actually understand quite a lot. There are things he doesn’t
recognise that we immediately do – why his father and the strange women that
visit his house keep disappearing, what his father’s enigmatic phrases mean, or
whether or not the majority of the servants are actually deaf and mute. But he
does know what his father does, and he knows that the tigers in the palace’s private
zoo are sometimes used to eat corpses. It would have been easy to make Tochtli
entirely innocent, entirely unaware, and I like that he isn’t. At times he’s
very unlikable; he uses very offensive language, cares mostly about his
material possessions and is not remotely phased by the knowledge that his
father frequently has people murdered. It’s all the more unnerving because he
is so young and yet is fully aware of and accepting of much of what is going on
in his life. What is appalling to us is normality to him.
Saying that, I wasn’t
always convinced by Tochtli’s voice. The narrative voice is funny, engaging and
above all distinctive, but while I truly believed this to be Tochtli’s voice, I
didn’t quite believe that it was the voice of a seven-year-old Tochtli. Had he
been nine or ten I would have been more convinced by it. Narrative voice is so dependent
on language that I don’t know to what extent this might be a translation issue,
but I did find it a little grating at times. Obviously this is a child being
exposed to things children aren’t usually exposed to, and he’s an unusual and precocious
child that loves reading dictionaries, but he still seemed a little too old to
me for some of the observations he makes – not so much the language he uses,
but the thought behind them.
The other characters beyond
Tochtli are well created. As with the rest of the book, although we only see
them through Tochtli’s eyes, Villalobos’s skilful writing enables us to get a
sense of Yolcaut and Mazatzin beyond what Tochtli sees. I think Mazatzin, the
tutor, was one of the most interesting characters. I found his relationship
with Tochtli, and his feelings about his position in Yolcaut’s palace very
interesting, even if we at times only glimpse them.
For me, the first and
third parts of the book were the strongest; the section in Liberia I was less
impressed by. I like the strangeness of it; it feels as odd as Alice in Wonderland, which links nicely with the title, but I don’t
think it was as effectively pulled off as the other two sections.
Yet even beyond this,
I think I was expecting slightly more of the story. To Tochtli, this is the
story of him getting his wish, a pygmy hippopotamus, but from the start you
feel as though there’s another story going on in the background. Of course
there is, but I think I was expecting that other story to take up more space,
or to become more important towards the end. This is part of the reason why it
feels more like a short story than a novel to me; the resolution is a
resolution to the story of Tochtli and pygmy hippopotamuses – and a very powerful
one – but there’s less of a resolution to everything else that’s going on. I
can’t decide whether I think this is for the best or not. On the one hand it’s
more realistic, but on the other I almost felt like the book was missing its climax
– or, if the climax occurred in Liberia, that it came too early. Or perhaps it
is there, but because we are in Tochtli’s voice and it isn’t, for him, the
climax of his story, we don’t really
get to see it. I’m not sure whether I can really criticise this as perhaps it’s
even more chilling to lack resolution – and regardless of my feelings on the overall
ending, the final few pages are brilliantly executed.
I definitely would
recommend Down the Rabbit Hole. It’s
the kind of book you keep thinking about after you’ve read it, and although I
wasn’t entirely convinced by the shape of the story, the characters and the
situation are enough to make it an intriguing, if uncomfortable, read. It’s not
a light or pleasant book, but it is an interesting, unsettling and excellent
one.
Greatest
strength: The
character of Totchli, and the way Villalobos makes us see more than he sees.
Greatest
weakness: As I
said, I was expecting a little more of a climax to the story.
Let’s finish on a quote: ‘If I counted dead people I’d know more than thirteen or fourteen people. Seventeen or more. Twenty, easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.’
Next week: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
Let’s finish on a quote: ‘If I counted dead people I’d know more than thirteen or fourteen people. Seventeen or more. Twenty, easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.’
Next week: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
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