The Shadow of the Shadow, 2d ed.

• Author: Hernandez Martin, Jorge

The early 1920s in Mexico marked the stage when the revolutionary sectors represented by General Alvaro Obregon consolidated their hold on power. This juncture provides the backdrop to the history novel The Shadow of the Shadow, in which Taibo II blends fiction and history in a passionate intrigue that revolves around a conspiracy to grab the oil fields and declare the area a republic independent of Mexico. The year is 1922, and foreign investors are worried about the legal consequences of Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917, which declares underground resources to be national property. They are also uneasy over the current of nationalism which has been shaking the Mexican nation for a decade. The novel focuses on the lives of four friends in the capital: a reporter, a lawyer of dubious reputation, a poet who longs for the days when he was a fighter in Villa's armies, and an anarcho-syndicalist who is living to the hilt this important moment in the history of the Mexican labor movement. The friends are in the habit of meeting to play dominoes and find themselves drawn into murky happenings that imperil their lives.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, one of the leading exponents of the new Mexican police novel, combines his wide-ranging knowledge about the press and Mexican labor movements with his skill in creating suspense to produce this narrative. His plot reflects the aspirations of the country's urbanites at this point in the postrevolutionary phase, peopled by young officers and cultivated young women, progressive students, wealthy captains of industry, renegades from the prerevolutionary aristocracy, ambitious lawyers, music-hall actresses, Russian counts, radical union organizers, and a motley underworld of the great city, which was also receiving waves of European immigrants.

At the top of the social pyramid, the victorious General Obregon represses, rewards, and conspires like an omnipotent shadow. The government investigation of the details of the intrigue that jeopardizes the nation's integrity evolves in parallel with that of the friends, to the point where one does not know whether the mysterious agents out to kill them are seditious or working for the government. The death of a trombonist in a public park, a note received in error, and a document...