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Bungle in the Jungle
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19605 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1991 |
2,350 Words |
| Author
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Lauren Weiner
Lauren Weiner covered Latin American affairs as a reporter for
the Washington Times for two years. Her articles and reviews
have appeared in the New Criterion, the National Interest,
Commentary, the Detroit News, and other publications. |
MAMISTA
Len Deighton
New York: HarperCollins, 1991
331 pp., $21.95
Espionage writer Len Deighton has committed a grave sin against machismo. The "MAMista" (Movimiento de Action Marxista, or Marxist Action Movement) is a fictional rebel force that fights on defiantly in the jungles of the made-up country of "Spanish Guiana" despite the fact that, as one of its members observes, "Moscow is just a place to buy a McDonald's hamburger."
The author of The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and twenty other World War II-based and Cold War-based novels would be headed for early retirement if he did not seek out new frontiers of international conflict. Sometimes Deighton's moves come just in the nick of time. When it rained glasnost in the Soviet Union, Deighton's friction sheltered in East Germany: In Spy Hook (1988), the redoubtable British agent Bernard Samson called East Berlin "virtually the only place to find a regime staunch and wholehearted in its application of the teachings of Karl Marx." The year after that the Wall fell. And now, what with the Sandinista revolution having been dumped by the Nicaraguan electorate, Colombia's M-19 guerillas having turned in their guns, and the chief ideologist of the Salvadoran FMLN forswearing Leninism as they negotiate (and shoot) their way toward a cease-fire that is expected by year's end, it is difficult to accept Deighton's newest premise--that Marxism is "flourishing" in Spanish-speaking countries while disappearing everywhere else.
It is even more difficult to imagine how Deighton, evidently playing on the Nicaraguan revolutionary moniker, could have committed the above-mentioned offense against machismo without malice aforethought. For it hardly needs saying that no self-respecting Latin American male would identify himself by an acronym that sounds an awful lot life "little momma." Moreover, to this prissy insult is added a doggy one: The novel's narco-political intrigue includes a rival guerrilla force called the "PEKINista." What this stands for we are never told, but the group hides among the coca plantations in a manner reminiscent of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas of Peru.
And yet, I'd wager that the author merely has a tin ear and does not intend to demean. Deighton is typically cynical about communist attempts to bring about a paradise on earth, and his latest novel is no exception. But he is careful to have the book's characters make
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