The novel takes up and puts down these confused, violent, self-justifying tirades, each focal character revealing a little more about the previous one, a little more about the circumstances of the murder.
Munra, who drove the van away from the scene, denies he was involved, and anyway claims that the Witch was in fact a man: “You only had to hear his voice and see his hands to know he was a homosexual.” While the pathetic Brando – who was certainly in the van that day and may or may not have found the room where the Witch kept “a shedload of gold coins”, or perhaps a “diamond ring that no one had ever seen” – obsessively revisits his adolescent dreams of bestiality. But Yesenia has hated him from the start. Suspicion falls immediately on Maurilio - not old Maurilio, buried beneath a canary yellow gravestone by his doting grandmother after he caught Aids in jail, but young Maurilio - who was seen by cousin Yesenia dragging a body dressed all in black from the Witch’s house into a blue van. No one’s monologue is dependable and the contorted familial relationships and naming conventions of the village leave you at times unsure who you’re reading about. As a result it’s hard to unravel who did what.
Everyone blames everyone else for everything failed in their lives. So who killed the Witch? In La Matosa everyone is known as a drunk, a user and/or a sponger and an irresponsible piece of shit. The genius of Hurricane Season lies in the way its author encourages the reader to work with this babble to build not just the narrative of the murder, but also a picture of a poverty-stricken community further devastated by the coming of oil capital and the drugs industry. Paragraphing is managed instead by the full stops between extended sentences – breathless, bad-mouthed, resentful sentences, sentences that are fetid, rhythmic and readable, full of insult and gossip, anecdotes and digressions.
There are no paragraphs, only chapter breaks. Eight chapters of the villagers’ testimony, each written out of a different subjectivity, become short stories in themselves.
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