For several decades Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has been outspoken on behalf of free speech and against tyranny, which he knew as a young man in his homeland. In 1990 he ran for the presidency of Peru on a liberal platform, unsuccessfully. He has served as president of PEN International, the writers' organization. He loves to write about rebels and revolutions. So far so good. Even more, however, he loves to write about the brutality that incites rebellion. His novels abound with scenes of mayhem, murder, rape, and mutilation. They verge on the gratuitously lurid, often placing the reader in the unsought role of voyeur. This is not so good.

Many of Vargas Llosa's works intertwine or alternate passages of fact and fiction. His new novel, The Feast of the Goat, opens with the fiction, set in 1996. After 35 years, Urania Cabral, a prominent lawyer in New York, returns to her native Dominican Republic, which she left at the age of 14. We find out why at the very end, as well as why she hates her aged, infirm father, a disgraced former senator. The novel's factual subject is the 1961 assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo; it unfolds on his last day, with numerous flashbacks and wide-ranging narrative excursions.

Trujillo, a figure cut from the same cloth as Caligula, is the eponymous goat and has deservedly been called much worse. His reign of terror lasted slightly more than 30 years, and he prided himself on transforming the country from backward chaos to a state of efficient, functioning modernity. His means were extreme repression, torture, imprisonment, appropriation of property, bribery, and corruption of every imaginable kind. He was aided by an Army and secret police made up of relatives and like-minded thugs and sadists. A small group of dissidents killed him in his car on a dark road, but the planners numbered several dozen more, many of them high-ranking military officers, abetted by the CIA, whose earlier tolerance of Trujillo had finally run out. In the aftermath, all but two of the conspirators were dispatched outright or tortured to death; with excessive relish, the novel will tell you precisely how.

These facts are readily available in histories of the era, and Vargas Llosa follows them closely in able reportorial fashion (he worked as a journalist in Paris in his youth). What he wishes to accomplish beyond a vivid and thorough depiction of a vile regime, succeeded by one slightly less vile, is not clear. And yet the historical novel is a genre he has used throughout a distinguished career, notably in The War of the End of the World (1981) and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984), a work that played with facts in formally innovative ways. His most ambitious and esteemed book, Conversations in the Cathedral (1989), offered a grim view of Peruvian life under the eight-year dictatorship of Colonel Manuel Odría, beginning in 1948.

In a 1987 essay, Vargas Llosa wrote: “Literary truth is one thing, historical truth another. But, although it may be full of fabrications … literature presents us with a side of history that cannot be found in history books. For literature does not lie gratuitously. Its deceits, devices and hyperbole all serve to express those deep-seated and disturbing truths which only come to light in this oblique way.” True enough, as those of us who were introduced to the Yorks and Lancasters by way of Shakespeare can attest. But Vargas Llosa does not begin to do for Trujillo what Shakespeare did for the Richards and Henrys. The unalloyed cruelty shown here is neither complex nor interesting, and lingering on its details yields easily to sensationalism. Rather than pity or terror, the monstrous Trujillo as protagonist provokes simple disgust and outrage.

Vargas Llosa appears not to have used many “deceits” in presenting historical truth, though he does invent pages of believable if repetitive dialogue and rumination for the jittery conspirators—brave and noble in varying degrees, motivated by idealism or revulsion or personal revenge. As for “hyperbole,” in the case of Trujillo that is hardly necessary. Except for two characters handled with psychological depth, the “deep-seated and disturbing truths” about the assassination are not revealed in a particularly “oblique way”; moreover, they came to light years ago.

The first exception is General José René Román, secretary of the Armed Forces, who had agreed to support the conspirators and assume power upon Trujillo's death, but plans go awry, and at the crucial moment the conspirators cannot find him. Instead, Román learns the news from General Arturo Espaillat; a Trujillo henchman known aptly as Razor, and caves in, overwhelmed by an inexplicable passivity. “From that moment on, and in all the minutes and hours that followed, when his fate was decided, and the fate of his family, the conspirators, and, in the long run, the Dominican Republic, General José René Román always knew with absolute lucidity what he should do. Why did he do exactly the opposite?” Why indeed? Trujillo is dead, yet his quasi-mystical power endures: “Like so many officers, so many Dominicans, before Trujillo his valor and sense of honor disappeared, and he was overcome by a paralysis of his reason and his muscles, by servile obedience and reverence. He often had asked himself why the mere presence of the Chief—his high-pitched voice and the fixity of his gaze—annihilated him morally.” Vargas Llosa might have examined that curious paralysis more closely; as it stands, it is pure melodrama.

The only character immune to the fixity of Trujillo's gaze is Joaquin Balaguer, the puppet president (also poet and belletrist) who quite unexpectedly assumes genuine power after the assassination. Balaguer's personal mantra is “never, for any reason, lose your composure.” The chapters describing his consummate political shrewdness, slyness and daring beneath a modest guise are the best in the book. Vargas Llosa shifts from fast-paced-thriller mode to give a subtle, finely imagined account of Balaguer deftly balancing volatile factions. Besides manipulating public opinion, he declaws the military by threats of exposure, panders to the Catholic Church, placates the CIA, accommodates Trujillo's family, and to ensure his own rule abandons the assassins to their gruesome fate. The wily Balaguer is a far cry from Trujillo. He looks the other way when his schemes require violence: “Do not give me any details, I beg you. It is easier to deal with the criticisms I receive from all around the world if I am not aware that the excesses they denounce are true.” Later, if possible and expedient, he will try to establish a minimally decent government. Vargas Llosa's steely cynicism serves our understanding of events better than his brutal details.

As for Urania Cabral, she remains a prop. In the hours prior to his death, Trujillo, a voracious sexual predator (in Vargas Llosa's world, sex, power and rage are close kin), recalls his most recent prey, a “skinny girl” who witnessed his humiliation in bed. The girl turns out to be Urania, a virginal 14, whose father offered her to Trujillo to buy his way back into the Chief's good graces. She has been unable to let a man near her since his manual rape of her; he can't do it the usual way because of prostate cancer, whether real or invented I don't know. (With everything else on his mind, he has to worry about unsightly stains on his crisp uniform.) This grotesque piece of exploitative banality, intended to illustrate the long reach of evil, is superfluous.