If hybridization is a strong trend in the noir novel it is due to works like those of Marc Pastor (Barcelona, ??1977), which can be both inside and outside the genre, as can be seen in his new novel, Riu of sapphires (Editions 62). There, a policeman with no vocation arrives in Ilakaka, a small town in the middle of the Madagascar desert, where the discovery of sapphires has attracted the worst of every house. There is a fragile balance that is broken with the arrival of a stranger. “It’s like the movie Yojimbo. I do remakes. I like to take stories that I like and rewrite them, as I already did in L’any de la plaga (La Magrana, 2010) with La invasió dels lladres de cosso. When everything is like a kind of amalgam, you have to have a mattress to fall on, and in this case I can fall into a story like that of the mercenary who arrives at a place and confronts the two rival gangs”, he explains shepherd The title is also a tribute, in this case to Río Bravo, which inspires an entire chapter, “like a western cliché”.
The novel was born while Pastor was writing Farishta (Amsterdam, 2017): “On a route the driver asked us if we wanted to see sapphires. We said yes and he took us to Ilakaka, a place where the guide – which we had neglected – stressed that we should not stop. It was like the Far West, with the gold rush, a city in the middle of the desert controlled by mafias… I saw the novel there.” The image of the country, he says, “doesn’t come out damaged, but the foreigners, the shitty neo-colonialism that is dedicated to putting the boot on the Malagasy people’s necks. But capitalism devours everything and now you can do tourism in those mines”.
The reader may also be surprised by the constant references to Camelot, the Fisher King, the Grail…: “Arthurian literature is one of my great passions and I wanted to incorporate it into a novel. I think it’s a double somersault: Madagascar, westerns and Arthurian literature. In the end, the western here is the pan, let’s say, and the rest are the ingredients, the rice, the shrimps… The knights are still cowboys, and the captain, whose name is Artur, is still the king “.
And everything is wrapped up in a complex plot in which paternity plays a very important role, as does the notion of destiny “because in the literary and personal sphere, the fight against destiny, like a condemnation, has me obsessed” . “Can we change it? It’s the essence of time travel, in which there are rules that say everything is immutable but you always look for a way to change it.” “From the first novel it’s clear that I’m playing and I want the reader to get involved, because this universe of interrelated novels – there may be twenty in which he develops the so-called Corvovers – is a board of game”, he says.
To be able to play, in fact, next week Lo rol de Réquiem (GdM and Mai Més) is published, a game based on the novel L’horror de requiem (Mai Més, 2020) which according to the author “is a wish fulfilled and a pride”. “It’s also a strange novel, because the reader or the player has to finish it,” he says.
The author, a police officer since 1998, is clear that “everywhere we have the same obsessions, the same fears and the same violence, but the difference is access to weapons and social control, usually by a government, but a Malagasy, an Ecuadorian, someone from Kyiv or Lleida or Ilakaka, we are equal”.
