[In the following review, Williamson lauds the poetic narrative and accomplished storytelling in The General in His Labyrinth.]

In The General in His Labyrinth Gabriel García Márquez displays once more his preoccupation with the condition of failure. The novel begins at the point where Simón Bolívar, the great hero of Spanish American Independence, realizes that everything he has fought for is lost; the dream of continental unity, of creating a single nation “from Mexico to Cape Horn,” has been shattered. Spurned and insulted by squabbling demagogues, Bolívar decides to leave the country and seek exile in Europe. The narrative relates his voyage from the highland capital down the Magdalena River to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast, a fateful journey that, in carrying him to the sea, leads to death.

This is not a historical novel in the conventional sense; it contains no grand scenes, no analysis of major events, few portraits of important characters and it shows little interest in ideas or political beliefs. And yet, intensely focused as it is on the character of Bolívar, the novel presents him entirely from the outside; like the faithful manservant José Palacios, the narrator too can only wonder at the mystery of his leader's motives.

While keeping this reverential distance, García Márquez nevertheless assimilates the General to his fictional world. Around the protagonist he has woven a poetic narrative, a web of stories that mythologizes the historical figure. As always, he takes risks in the story-telling; his narrator is gushing about the beauty of tropical nights, women sparkle and smoulder, and the situations he contrives are often shameless in their indulgence of romantic fancies. These excesses are stiffened by the slyness of his irony and his marvellous sense of timing. As in Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), García Márquez chooses to mimic the tricks of nostalgia by giving rein to old dreams and half-forgotten yearnings only to pull the reader up short in the face of reality.

The novel draws its energies primarily from the mirage of a failed creole utopia, one which is remote from the utilitarian concerns of modern liberal politics. Enveloped in a sacred nimbus of authority, the great republican resembles nothing so much as a tribal king or a medieval monarch—the common people come up to him in the streets to touch him, he dispenses privileges to his favourites, he can count on undying loyalty from his entourage, with whom he is identified by “links of class or blood”. An enslaved mulatta is set free in the act of love with him, and even when physical consummation is beyond him, a pretty girl becomes a woman after a night in his hammock.

The General in His Labyrinth is written in a style that blends old-fashioned stateliness with a sharp colloquial tone; its rhythms translate well into English (the original was reviewed in the TLS on July 14, 1989), and Edith Grossman captures them with tact and skill. The General's obscenities are a problem, however; some expletives are less harsh and more current in Spanish than their English equivalents, and any translator would have difficulty preventing the foul-mouthed Liberator from sounding like a cop from the Bronx. “Porra” or “peudejo”, for instance, have largely lost their lewd connotations and are misrepresented by “prick” and “asshole”.