On the evening of November 7, 1990, the car carrying Maruja Pachón and her sister-in-law, Beatriz Villamizar, was ambushed in a Bogotá street by assassins sent by the boss of the Medellín cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar. The attackers briskly killed the chauffeur and drove the two women away to captivity. Maruja Pachón's slender claim to fame was that she was the sister-in-law of Luis Carlos Galán, a New Liberal politician and an enemy of the cocaine traders, who had been murdered the year before. The kidnappers belatedly decided to keep Beatriz when the radio identified her as the sister of another well-known Colombian politician.

Gabriel García Márquez's latest book [Noticia de un secuestro], which will appear in English translation soon, gives a detailed account of the atrocities inflicted on these women and on several of the other hostages Escobar had kidnapped at about the same time, in particular Marina Montoya, the sister of the former Secretary-General of the Presidency, and Diana Turbay, the daughter of the previous President. There is much which must not be revealed in this review, since the novel relies on suspense, but the fate of Marina Montoya, described in its pages, exemplifies the misery that Escobar and his like have inflicted on Colombians. Aged over sixty, the mother of seven children and a grandmother, she was slaughtered on Escobar's orders, in retaliation for a police operation. Many similar incidents described here will bring tears of rage and despair to the reader's eyes.

The Nobel laureate's latest offering is a nonfictional record of real events, but one so transformed by a brilliant story-teller that it must be called a novel. It signals an abrupt departure from the magic realism to which the author had returned in Of Love and Other Demons (1995), an exotic and escapist romance about the love of a priest for ansiguana-eating local beauty. But there is nothing particularly surprising about this change of direction. García Márquez is not a spontaneous writer. He agonizes over his novels and is self-conscious about the overall shape of his oeuvre. Nevertheless, readers who associate him with vivid, even reckless, imaginative exuberance may be disconcerted by the sobriety of Noticia de un secuestro (“Story of a Kidnap”). It is, or claims to be, meticulously factual, and is based on a diary kept by one of the hostages, on long and harrowing interviews with the victims and their families and on research done by the author and his assistants. This is not the first time that the author has imposed on himself an exercise in imaginative self-restraint after a bout of self-indulgence; for example, he chose to write a historical novel, The General in His Labyrinth, after the fictional freedoms of his romantic masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera (1988). But this book returns to techniques we had not seen since Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982), and it is even more documentary than that apparently anecdotal account.

The result is a powerful, disturbing work, but an uncharacteristic one. The image of García Márquez as a reliable purveyor of serious historical and social fact does not come readily to mind—although this was the basis of his (admittedly minor) literary reputation before One Hundred Years of Solitude. Readers will have to forget his boast that he invented news stories when he was a journalist and banish from their minds passages like that in the introduction to Of Love and Other Demons, in which he claims to have witnessed personally the disinterment of an ancient female skeleton that had grown twenty-two metres of copper-coloured hair in the grave. García Márquez's facts may be fiction, but his best-known novels are packed with fiction that sounds like fact, and this is what makes them irresistible to millions of readers. In Of Love and Other Demons, a solemn Te Deum in Cartagena Cathedral is interrupted by an invading horde of “satanic macaque monkeys”; it rains non-stop for five years in One Hundred Years of Solitude; Dr Urbino's parrot, in Love in the Time of Cholera, “speaks French like an academician” and can recite the Latin Mass and more besides. Innumerable similar examples have given his most famous novels a reputation for endearing craziness. But they also tend to portray Latin America as a place of magical fun; admittedly not always harmless fun, but nevertheless exotic and surreal enough to evoke a land filled with laughter and romance. This aspect of his work, which is absolutely unlike the infernal visions of his arch-rival Mario Vargas Llosa, may explain the peculiar ideas about Latin America held by some of his foreign admirers. The tone of such books is strangely at odds with the austerity of their author's left-wing politics. His often outlandish fictional world is a wondrous but apolitical place, lacking clear or resolvable public issues, as absurd worlds usually do. His public statements, by contrast, reveal an ardent Castroite, banned from the United States, pledged to the notion of “world socialism” and tempted by revolutionary solutions.

This new book attempts to bring together the author's writing and politics. It is not in the remotest sense magic realism. Grim, businesslike, carefully and effectively understated, it reads like the work of a writer whose taste for play has been killed by current events. It succeeds because it does not transform the world it describes, but subordinates itself to the hard facts of the characters' torments with a degree of self-effacement and denial surprising in a writer who can call on such resources of imagery and words. The events described speak only too eloquently for themselves, in prose that has little of the tropical colour that we have come to expect. In fact, the narrative seems unusually artless compared with García Márquez's best-known books. Its grammar and vocabulary are much more locally Colombian than in his other novels, and the spelling has scandalized several reviewers, as when “a ver” appears more than once as “haber”, a solecism about as frightful as “novvel” or “existence”.

Rumours that García Márquez was preparing a novel about the Colombian drug trade may have led some readers to expect a political tract. In fact, the book's politics are even more tantalizing than is usual in his work. In this respect, his treatment, or non-treatment, of Colombia's left-wing guerrillas deserves careful analysis. They are not well represented in the book; its apparent commitment to a liberal-humanist idea of individual rights and its implicit endorsement of the—to put it mildly—precarious democracy embodied in Colombia's civil institutions presumably inhibit the author from saying anything favourable about a Marxist alternative. But this may not be the whole of the story. Some Latin American reviewers, for whom these things matter, have already noted that this book dramatizes the plight of the Colombian elite: company directors, top journalists, television producers. One critic complained that the author forgot to interview the families of murdered policemen, chauffeurs, or the other countless proletarian victims of Escobar. This is not surprising when one considers an obvious trend in García Márquez's writing. His recent novels tend to neglect the claims of the underdogs who were represented in earlier novels, for example the innocent Eréndira or the obscure hero of No One Writes to the Colonel. They concentrate now on the tribulations of a more privileged sector, like those pillars of society, Fermina and Dr Urbino in Love in the Time of Cholera, or public figures, like Bolívar in The General in His Labyrinth. One detects a growing inconsistency between the social focus of García Márquez's fiction and his public politics—perhaps it has been there for years, but we never noticed. This tension is no doubt the main source of the most attractive feature of his writing: its enigmatic quality. Trying to pin down the politics of his books is like trying to net a fog.

The chief, though not the most prominent character in Noticia de un secuestro is the depressing figure of Pablo Escobar, whose rise from poverty to a personal fortune of about 3 to 5 billion US dollars may be studied in detail in a recent and alarming book by Simon Strong, Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars (1995). Some such background reading may assist English readers of García Márquez's book, although he includes most of the information about how Escobar suborned and destroyed Colombia's civil institutions, and he assumes no profound grasp of the history of the country's civil war—that dreary round of torture and murder whose earlier stages are the background to several of García Márquez's novels.

This three-sided battle between the government, the private armies of the drug cartels and the Marxist guerrillas has long been a nightmare of savagery in which a quick death is considered a stroke of luck. Amid this horror, the embattled figure of César Gaviria stands out, and it offers an important clue to the book's politics. Gaviria, who was the controversial President of the Republic from 1990 to 1994, had few cards to play against Escobar's policy of offering his influential enemies, especially politicians, journalists and judges, a straight choice between a huge bribe or a bullet. But one powerful trump in his hand was the threat of extradition to the United States; Escobar and his like are terrified of American prisons. This threat, added to the gratifying spectacle of Escobar's growing fear of the armed forces, enabled Gaviria to bargain. Some have claimed that this was a sign of weakness or worse; but García Márquez's portrayal of him is not unflattering. The kidnaps and murders described in the book were Escobar's counterbids in the game. In return for the suspension of extradition, he eventually agreed to surrender. This much is public knowledge. García Márquez's treatment of the events is truly gripping, but it is a pity that the master of magical realism does not dwell on what happened thereafter; it would have called forth his powers. Escobar soon bribed and intimidated the authorities into letting him redesign his prison with sixty-four-inch television screens, jacuzzis, a football pitch, gymnasium, disco, motorcycle track, a bar and at least eleven phone lines. Even then, he was so ungrateful as to escape, although things went badly for him afterwards.

The treatment of the hostages' captors will no doubt irritate anyone inclined to Escobar's own view that the drug cartels are innocent and regrettable by-products of wicked American consumerism. García Márquez treats the sicarios (the all-too-familiar Colombian word for hired killers) with constraint, but not with indulgence. A couple of them are educated and respectful, but most behave like pigs. Many are, like their boss, pathetically pious—this reflects Escobar's status as a saint among the credulous. (He was astute enough to pay for occasional housing and other local projects. More than one Medellín church altar was graced with his portrait, and some priests blessed the work of his hit men.) Several of the guards wear effigies of the Holy Child and dedicate their bloody work to Him and His Mother, and also, of course, to their own beloved “mummys”, their fathers having left or been killed long before. For the rest, they are unstable, coarse, tense, bored and ignorant. When Beatriz's guards hear that she is a physiotherapist, they fear she has the power to turn them mad.

The novel's central image is of a few middle-aged or elderly women, lying day after day on filthy mattresses on the floor in a fetid, smoke-filled room a few feet square, with two or three hooded louts with machine-guns squatting in the corner watching their every move, alternately taunting, threatening, sulking, reassuring, or apologizing. The thugs seem torn between a desire to reduce their captives to insanity and a fear that they might turn hysterical; one assumes that Marina attracted her fate by being obviously affected by captivity. The courage and dignity of the victims is worthy only of a story-teller of the stature of García Márquez, who has the gift of transforming journalism into art, thanks to his uniquely infallible eye for the dramatically necessary detail. He also infuses his account with a restrained sadness; and this helps to make it successful as a plea that the plight of Colombia must be ignored no longer. The publication of this novel in English will be a major event, and it will surely transform the outside world's awareness of how a country has been destroyed by insane greed and excessive personal wealth. It should also remind us that if we do not take note, the fate of Colombia could be the future of millions of others.