Trudie's Reviews > The Untameable

I have been holding off writing a review of The Untameable, until the indignation at the amount of time wasted on this behemoth resides. Since that seems a way off, I will at least try to remain even-handed.

Hidden amongst these 700 pages is a really good story.

Set in 1960s Mexico with a young Juan Guillermo navigating his way through a ruthless society of corruption, extremist religious gangs, and poverty. Juan seeks vengeance for the murder of his brother, Carlos, and the subsequent misfortunes that befall his family. Meanwhile, in the wilds of the Yukon, a wolf is tracked by an Inuit hunter, and then.. nothing much else happens in that story for quite some time (sigh). 
 
When this novel is good, it is very good; the characters are interesting, and the scene-setting is strong, as you would expect from the writer of the films; Babel, 21 Grams, and Amores perros. However, I would caution that even Oscar-nominated screenwriters need editors. 

The answer to how this novel lost its promising trajectory is likely to be found buried somewhere in the icy wilderness of the Yukon. Whilst the homage to Jack London's 1906 novel, White Fang is noble in principle, this slow-moving storyline hampered what was a far more interesting tale of street gangs and corruption.

Eventually, the two parts of this novel do intersect but that payoff is a rather bedraggled affair. And while I believe that Arriaga had ambitions far above a Narcos crime tale, simply name-checking Blake, Rulfo, Faulkner, and Nietzsche in little digressions between chapters did not serve to elevate this novel to the profound. Likewise, only an author of Max Porter's stature can get away with pages consisting of words artfully drifting down the page or writing the word zigzag in a literal zigzag. All this spoke of an author trying too damn hard and racking up the page count in the process. 

A secondary source of unnecessary frustration, and a prime sinkhole for loss of dramatic tension, was the constant foreshadowing and erratic time shifts. While the bones of the story are set down within a few hundred pages, there remain few elements of surprise. The murder of Juan's brother Carlos for example is set up early on and we circle back to it constantly, adding more poignant (or irrelevant) details. The promised vengeance is oft-discussed but never materializes in a way that feels entirely satisfying. How did this all go so wrong ?

As the title suggests, The Untameable, is a testosterone-laced exploration of what could loosely be called the "Man in the Wild" trope; with lines such as A Tiger wants to be a tiger and some awkward machismo riffs on the nature of Man and Wolf - I found myself eye-rolling more than is ideal for good ocular health. Although the few female characters are sympathetic there were several tone-deaf moments. Juan spends several self-indulgent pages bemoaning the fact his girlfriend has a sexual history that does not involve him, he is haunted by the specter of her promiscuity,  poor mite!. This attitude, although reflective of the era, really started to grate in the way it is reiterated for several female characters. 

Well, it seems I have given this book a pummelling, but there is a core of a good story here for patient readers. The takeaway lesson: few stories need the large canvas of 700 pages and even fewer writers have the skills to pull it off. As a result, I rather resent the interminable trudge across the icy expanse of the Yukon to arrive at a rather ho-hum windblown shack of a conclusion.