Imagine being sealed into an empty water tanker along with a dozen terrified people. All you’ve brought with you is a jug of water and a crumpled handful of dollar bills. You’ve put your life in the hands of mercenary human traffickers — “coyotes” — hoping to cross the Mexican border into the U.S. “I thought what would it take me to leave my home and family to cross the border for work” says author John Vaillant. “What can a person endure?”
Vaillant exploits the possibilities in his new novel The Jaguar’s Children (Knopf Canada) a propulsive thriller that combines creeping dread with vivid journalistic detail. Hector a young Mexican man along with his friend Cesar have decided to seek their fortune by making an illegal run for the U.S. border. Sealed into an empty water tanker stuffed with other immigrants the trip becomes a fight for survival when the tanker breaks down somewhere in the desert.
Abandoned by the coyotes and with only a dying cellphone offering a chance of survival Hector begins to ruminate on what brought him to make such a desperate and deadly decision. The Jaguar’s Children is a speedy page-turner upending typical genre conventions with Vaillant’s meticulous research on everything from Oaxacan jaguar worship and the politics of genetically modified corn manufacturing to the horrifying details of how one slowly dies of thirst. (Trust me it’s really really awful.)
The novel began with Vaillant’s wife a potter and anthropologist moving the family to Oaxaca in 2009. While she was busy at work Vaillant was putting the final touches on his non-fiction book The Tiger. Though he had spent a lot of time around Arizona (where his in-laws live) and the desert region of the Senora border he says he had no intentions of writing about Mexico.
“All I wanted to do was lie in a hammock and read but I kept seeing things that were so strange and moving. I thought I might write a travel piece but then the first line of the novel just came to me. A voice from the outside that said ‘Sorry to bother you but I need your assistance.’ So I kept listening” says Vaillant who calls the voice which became Hector in the novel “a guided hallucination.”
Vaillant describes the area around Oaxaca as one of the more traditional Mexican states that still retains much of its older culture. Still one in three people go north seeking work and prosperity in the U.S. Vaillant says that coyotes guides who take people illegally across the border were once reliable and honorable. Now that the human traffic is controlled by drug cartels it has become ruthless and mercenary. “It’s a terrible thing to be screwed over by your own countrymen. Life has become cheaper and cheaper” he says adding that immigration by Mexicans into the U.S. is at an all-time low. “That’s not to say a lot of people aren’t trying to get through but that they’re being deterred by the fences border patrol and the gangs. You want a job not to get killed.”
Those who do make the trip across the border find themselves in the unremittingly harsh and unforgiving landscape of the desert. “It possesses a stark beauty” says Vaillant. “It’s so desolate and lunar it looks like Mars. Then there are places of beauty like a square mile of flowers.”
The Jaguar’s Children is Vaillant’s first novel following two acclaimed non-fiction works the Governor General’s Award-winning The Golden Spruce and The Tiger. Though he says there’s a lot of creativity that goes into his non-fiction he saw writing a novel as the hardest thing he could do and found his first foray into fiction both exhilarating and terrifying. “With non-fiction you’re going into a labyrinth but you’re following someone else’s strings there’s an existing story there” he says. “With a novel it’s all you.”
He adds that writing his previous non-fiction works was necessary to give him the skills and confidence to write The Jaguar’s Children. “If the stakes aren’t high there’s no point.”
John Vaillant will read on January 19 at 7 p.m. at John Dutton Theatre (Calgary Central Library).
