Señor Vargas Llosa, Peru's most famous writer, tells us the story of Urania Cabral, the estranged daughter of disgraced Dominican politician Agustin Cabral. In 1996 Urania returns to the Dominican Republic for the first time since 1961, just before the end of the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, despot and tyrant between 1930 and the year that Urania left for the USA.

Urania left the Dominican Republic in uncertain circumstances, circumstances that have caused her to hate her now-paralysed father. As she tells her mute and confined father about her life in America, she also remembers her life in Ciudad Trujillo, the capital, which is now renamed Santo Domingo.

However, Vargas Llosa is never one to tell a simple story. Ever since making his name with the shocking Time of the Hero/La ciudad y los perros, Vargas has told multi-stranded stories from many different and often confusing perspectives. The Feast of the Goat/La fiesta del chivo is no different, as the narrative also tells us about Trujillo's final few days from the point of view of Trujillo himself, his major allies, his enemies, and the men that actually assassinated him on 30 May 1961.

Concentration is therefore required to read The Feast of the Goat , but Vargas is constantly helpful, often reminding us of who different characters are and of several of the salient facts that affect the plot. Which is useful, considering that everyone has a name, a nickname, and a job description and they can be referred to by any or all of them above at any given time. Trujillo himself is called, among other things, the Goat, the Man, the Generalisimo,his Excellency, the Boss, the Patriarch of the New Fatherland, the Benefactor, the Restorer of Financial Independence.

By recounting the last days of the regime of an Hispanoamerican despot (if that definition is correct - see Lupe Maradiaga's Case of Mistaken Identity), Vargas Llosa enters into a rich tradition in Latin American literature - the genre of the Despot, which includes Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch/El otono del patriarca , fellow Nobel Prize-winner Miguel Angel Asturias' El senor Presidente , Joan Didion's Salvador and Carlos Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz/La muerte de Artemio Cruz .

However, by taking a real-life dictator, Vargas also participates in a literary tradition that sees history and fiction mixing with ease to create a false, but believable past, much as Garcia Márquez did with the last days of Simon Bolivar in The General in his Labyrinth/El general en su laberinto .

The result is a wonderfully original work that can be read on many different levels: as a piece of literature, as a piece of pseudo-history, and as a book of ideas, both theoretical and political. Not that Vargas is one to preach - although the reader quickly comes to despise both Trujillo, his evil henchman Colonel Johnny Abbes and his son Ramfis. The final few chapters rid us of any sympathy we might have had for any of these characters as they rape and torture others in their vain attempts to preserve the crumbling Trujillo regime.

However, although we might dislike the above trio, we do not truly like any of the characters, with the possible exception of Urania, too young and innocent to have understood the regime that she fled. Urania's father Agustin is of questionable morals, and none of the other political players have any scruples in turning a blind eye to Trujillo's more nefarious activities during his regime. Included is Joaquin Balaguer, the President who helps to restore democracy after Trujillo's murder. He is without question a good man and a shrewd tactician in ridding the Dominican Republic of Trujillo's family once Trujillo himself is dead. But he did support the dictator for 31 years, without question and without apparent regret. How good is he really?

Even Trujillo's assassins have their own personal reason for wanting to murder the dictator. Some have been very close to Trujillo, only for him to have betrayed them, or 'tested' them into committing an atrocity. None stands against Trujillo on the basis of mere ideology. More often than not, revenge is the motive for their participation.

As a result, we get a very murky picture of the world of politics in the Dominican Republic during the regime, one with which we must presume Vargas Llosa can identify, following his candidacy for President of Peru in 1990.

Vargas Llosa has an excellent eye for period detail, and everything is there from the names of minor players in the Trujillo regime, to fashion trends, street names, radio stations, newspapers and brand names. The recreation of the past is so lively and convincing that it is often hard to remember that Vargas has poured some purely fictional characters into his melting pot.

Subsequently, we can see that Vargas also participates in the debates of the nature of history and the past which abound in current and popular postmodern discourse. The Past, History, is gone, so say the theorists, and to fictionalise/debate over it is to create it. Thus we live in a world where the past is not some absolute truth that a historian will one day definitively uncover. Rather it is something vague and irretrievable that will forever be debated; one person's version of events is as credible and worthy as another's. In fact, any historian is really a writer of fiction, for to put an order on the chaos of the past is to fictionalise it.Vargas plays with this idea by deliberately creating fictional elements (the story of Urania Cabral, the names of some of Trujillo's assassins) and using them to recreate a Dominican Republic that is coherent and whole.But not real. Vargas writes a work of fiction that masks itself as a work of history, but should not be read as such. Whilst there is truth about human motivation, political reality and so on in The Feast of the Goat, it is not a true historical account of Trujillo's demise.

Vargas' familiarity with postmodern ideas can be seen in the way in which he insistently reminds us of the names of the streets and buildings in Ciudad Trujillo. Many places are named after the dictator and members of his immediate family.And yet little description is made of the places themselves. It is as though the street names have replaced the very things that they name. The signified is no longer as important as the signifier; appearances, names and branding are much more important than reality or truth, something which Trujillo's propaganda machine corroborates time and again as political enemies are defamed in the press for things that they have not done.

The Dominican Republic's reality is not important. All that matters is that which is written in the papers, that which is announced on the radio. The Dominican Republic becomes, therefore, the work of fiction that Vargas Llosa is writing, since we likewise believe what he tells us. And we might as well believe him, because the truth will never, apparently, be uncovered. Even when Urania tells her gathered cousins the terrible reason why she has not returned to the Dominican Republic for 35 years, they feel nothing for her but envy of the fact that she is educated, living in America, comfortably employed and out of the Republic.

However, to counter the unreality that is the novelistic life in the Dominican Republic of the 1960s, there are the immutable truths of suffering and death. The torture scenes in particular are told so sparingly that we can hardly bear to read some of them, as Johnny Abbes and Ramfis Trujillo do their worst. Whilst everything else may be a dream, such atrocities prove that there is something beyond the superficial; namely, the bravery of the human spirit. Trujillo's assassins may find their friends betraying them, they may lose their families, but at no point do they regret what they have done. Vargas' portrayal of physical torment and suffering is such, though, that his characters eventually prefer death to living.

Vargas Llosa also manages to put the plight of the Dominican Republic into a wider context than merely domestic politics. The Dominican Republic was a key state in the 1940s and 1950s, because the USA feared communist uprisings there. Trujillo did his best to keep the Republic independent of the USA, of island neighbours Haiti, and of every other power in the Caribbean region of Latin America. All of these things are impartially dealt with by Vargas, and no comment is made about the fact that this dictator and perpetrator of countless atrocities was trained by the US government. The international politics of the time, just after the USA had disgraced itself with the failure of the Bay of Pigs uprising, are made clear, but without any narratorial prejudice.

Why, then, should it be that Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa writes a novel on the Dominican Republic? Precisely because his outsider status allows him to retain an absence of bias regarding a subject matter that any Dominican writermight find too personal to recall neutrally.

Among Dominicans, and certainly among Trujillistas, Vargas Llosa might come in for some criticism with regard to his historical accuracy. However, in terms of writing a historical novel, the average reader will find this a long, good and easy read. What is more, it is informative of a part of the world about which most people know little. It shows us how dictatorships, in all of their complexity and with all of their players, can still exist in a so-called postmodern world, in which something so hegemonic as a dictator is anathema. It gives a great sense of an interesting country at its most interesting time. But remember, it's only fiction.

William Brown

Chuck Palahniuk shot to fame on the back of a film, Fight Club. He wrote the novel from which the film was adapted, and whilst I am a huge fan of David Fincher's movie, I must admit that the novel is every bit as good.

Palahniuk was hailed atthe time as being the best American novelist since Don DeLillo (by Bret Easton Ellis, no less). Since then, Palahniuk has written three novels (Survivor, Invisible Monsters and now Choke) and the same quotations are used on the coverof each. Each novel is as intense as the first, with the hard, arrow-like prose that pierces the armour of modern society and reveals the soft preciousness of the underlying skin. Each also is characterised by short sentences and short paragraphs and short chapters and being able to read the books in one frenetic, death-bed sitting that is as intense as the worst hang-over.

But that the same things can be and are said about all of them might lead one to think that Palahniuk is a one-trick pony. And, yes, this is basically true. In Choke Victor Mancini is our first person sex-addict narrator who pretends to choke himself to death in restaurants so that he can be saved by people who will ever after feel that they have justified their existence. Only Victor is faking it; he does it on purpose. And then he thinks that he is the Son of God, the Second Coming of the Messiah. This is not so different from the messianic and masochistic aspects of Fight Club, nor from Survivor, in which television evangelism and the superficiality of modern American culture get a good bashing. As we are told in Choke: "He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself."

Mr Palahniuk's style and structure never varies and nor do his characters, therefore, which leads this reviewer to think that he has shot his bolt. Don't get your reviewer wrong, this is still pretty gripping stuff, and often quite a challenge to the norms that a reader expects from a novel. Masochism and the nature of desire are predominant and interesting themes in Palahniuk: his masochistic aesthetic leads one to believe that we ourselves are the objects of our desire, not another person. By this I mean that it is ourselves that we change to win love, not the other person. As much in Choke as in Fight Club (this is the closest to Fight Club of the three subsequent works), to win love/fulfil desire involves letting go of childish things and growing up.

Palahniuk also makes interesting swipes at history and how the past is dead; for Victor works in a 'living history' museum, where he dresses up as a historical figure living in a place like Plymouth (Maine), where the founding fathers landed. This evocation of our historical past, where hunter-gatherer skills were useful, fits in with Fight Club's strong reaction to emasculation.

Palahniuk also raises the age-old questions of the thin line between sanity and madness (especially with Victor's committed mother). He also engages in the postmodern idea that the world is devoid of meaning, that its significance has been lost, replaced only by a lonely, empty signifier: "We don't live in the real world anymore... We live in a world of symbols."

But this was all there in Fight Club and Choke disappoints because there has been no progression. Fight Club had the terrifying ending of the narrator still seemingly being mistaken for Tyler Durden after death. The Narrator's journey in Fight Club had taken him on Céline-like journey right to the end of the night. In Choke, however, the ending leaves us in the middle of the night: "where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night." As such, there is less feeling of closure, as if Palahniuk is no longer able look directly at death. The Narrator in Fight Club had to kill Tyler/himself. In Choke, Victor is only ever acting when he approaches death.

You do still get the same Palahniuk high from Choke, but its effect has been weakened; we need a stronger hit, we need to get even closer to death than Victor's choking, to feel like we the readers are alive and thinking.

If you have not read any Palahniuk, I would point you back to Fight Club ahead of Choke. The latter is not bad, but like the food that Victor chokes upon, it is not so fresh and feels like recycled turkey at Christmas: it's still the festive season, as it were, only the best has past.

Maybe Palahniuk will outdo himself with his next novel. I hope so. But as he writes more novels, it is becoming obvious that one solitary masterpiece stands on the landscape of his œuvre. We get the suspicion that, as with Victor, there is no Second Coming for Palahniuk. The constant referencesback to Fight Club - and the tired re-hashing of the Bret Easton Ellis quotation on every sleeve since - belies the fact that after Fight Club it was all downhill.

Anonymous Anon

Ah, yes. The old hunting debate. Back again for the third time since New Labour stepped in back in 1997, the proposal to ban foxhunting, in spite of being a smokescreen for more pressing issues such as why this country is going down the pan, is gaining momentum. (See William Newton's E-mail from America.)

Enter Roger Scruton (whose name, amusingly enough, is changed to Scrotum by my spell checker), conservative philosopher and polemicist who mourns the death of Old England, cannot stand the New Briton and thinks that to lose foxhunting would be precisely indicative of Britain going down the pan. He says it like it is and poses an outrageous threat to political correctness in many of his attitudes - towards women, towards protestors and towards animal-lovers.

Don't read this book if you take offence and are rabidly opposed to foxhunting, for rest assured, Scruton is as rude to you as you are to him. Only he's very clever and probably better at it than you. Which would make for a frustrating read.

There's no denying that he argues very well, and to the neutral observer or foxhunting fan, Scruton is consistently entertaining in his views, albeit that you must take them with a pinch of salt of the earth.

It's terribly unfashionable to be a bit conservative at the present, which is sad because any right-minded person must be a bit conservative about some things, even if only for personal and therefore irrational reasons. Which makes reading Scruton annoying and refreshing. Right-on readers like myself who are of course infallible feel embarrassed even to share Scruton's sentiments, just because they are so outmoded.

And yet I do find myself sharing some of his sentiments, even though we can pick holes in Scruton's argument without too much trouble. He is as guilty of projecting on animals that which he cannot possibly know for certain, in arguing that hounds are happy, as any so-called animal lover. Furthermore, Scruton argues with Marx's dictumthat enclosure (the setting up of small communities/the birth of culture) is the original sin. Rather, says Scruton, "enclosure was no ordinary fault, but the felix culpa which gave to the landscape its human face." In other words, to Scruton progress is only so good as it is convenient to his argument. Otherwise, to progress from Old England to anything else is awfully depressing.

Whilst Scruton has written this book, an act that in itself proves a desire for rational argument, one cannot help but feel that his insistent dismissal of what he sees as oik-ish students who have no idea about anything, is a bit of a put-downable offence. (Putting the book down, that is.) It reminds me of his fellow academic Terry Eagleton, whose left-wing hatred of those less clever than him meets with Scruton on the dark side of the political circle.

But Mr Scruton makes many good points in defence of the fox, in defence of the hounds and in defence of the horses. He gets to the core problem that many people in Britain perceive to be wrong with hunting: the social aspect. Scruton's foxhunting is not for toffs, but it is inviting and treats all as equals (apart from a few women who act like Ali G's Julie during rag week).

Not that Scruton's defence will work. Foxhunting may not be outlawed in England this time, but at some point it will follow suit from Scotland and go. And Britain will have taken another step in its indefatigable revenge on the middle classes that only made Britain the most powerful nation in the world all those long, depressing years ago.

I don't care about the fox's rights, personally. It's an animal (a vicious one at that). I don't care that hounds are trained to kill. This, for Scruton, is much healthier than the supposed human values we attach to animals these days, animals that do not have a chance of understanding said values. (Have you never been bitten or scratched by a cat that you thought was lovely, cuddly and affectionate?) Further, it is in fact more in touch with how the animals used to be before domestication - supposedly they were pack hunters. There seems to be a strong trend in our current culture that asks why human men are feeling emasculated and useless in a world where they have nothing to hunt or gather. Need we make hounds useless as well?

There is much to disagree with in Scruton, but at least he's passionate and articulate, unlike those May Day protestors that smash shop windows in London. The media will win this war, so anti-foxhunters need not worry: you will catch your prey eventually. 'Tis sad, though, that someone in the know about hunting through practical experience, and having approached the sport as an outsider, should not really be heard above the cacophony of tabloid conjecture that wears this tradition's name to the ground.

If you like to think, read this.

William Brown