A Town Is Besieged by Children, Foreign and Violent

A LUMINOUS REPUBLIC
By Andrés Barba

“When I’m asked about the 32 children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor,” explains the narrator in the first sentence of the novel “A Luminous Republic,” by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba. Containing both a thrillerish hook and a setup for pontification, this opening encapsulates something of the book’s form: a crime story told by an earnest, unnamed civil servant reminiscing on his stint as a government official in the provinces, reassessing his personal involvement in a public tragedy.

San Cristóbal is a quiet, nondescript place, an interior city rimmed by river and jungle. Its society lives in a precarious but largely peaceful symbiosis with the Indigenous Ñeê population. At one point, a group of mysterious children, ranging from 9 to 13 years old, arrives on the city’s streets. “The 32,” as they are often called throughout the book, speak an unknown private language, hang around public places and at first appear similar to the young mendicants the city is used to dealing with. But where the usual beggars are “simple and plaintive,” these newcomers “had a distinct sort of haughtiness, almost aristocratic.” Soon there are reports of assaults; and escalating tensions culminate in a supermarket massacre, the “miniature mob” ultimately stabbing two customers to death.

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After the children run away, the narrator’s memories dwell less on the incident itself than on its impact on the local community. A small cultural industry — photo exhibitions, academic studies and media stunts — flourishes in the aftermath of their vanishing. Unable to find the missing children or quell public anxiety, local officials oscillate between weak posturing and authoritarian suggestions, such as the creation of special detention centers. The city’s own children begin to feel a strange attraction toward their foreign counterparts, putting their ears to the ground to hear their footsteps; some even run away themselves in order to find them.

“A Luminous Republic” was first published in Spain in 2017, but its themes resonate almost overwhelmingly in America today, where it is impossible to read the words “juvenile detention center” without thinking of the U.S.-Mexico border. But the novel’s allegorical potential is stifled by a narrator who explains too much. He pores over the societal ramifications of the children’s disappearance so relentlessly he veers into platitudes (“loss of trust is similar to heartbreak”; “people pay the same sort of attention when they’re afraid as they do when they’re in love”), or an overlong pontification on the justice system, or a convoluted restating of the obvious (“that some ideas seem too absurd doesn’t preclude them from being true”).

The book follows in a long tradition of blending the genres of crime thriller and novel of ideas, but in this case what should be hybrid and fluid comes off as formally indecisive. Despite occasional flashes of charm (calling a local politician “neither smart enough to be dangerous nor harmless enough to be funny”), the narrator’s protracted yet unimaginative reflections slow down the plot, which then comes to rely less on nuance than on formula: Character sketches are swift, the denouement hasty.

The disappointing result may have something to do with the author’s choice of perspective. In his earlier novels — whether told through the lens of a prostitute’s daughter, as in “La Hermana de Katia” (yet to be translated into English), or that of the maimed orphan in the dark, masterly “Such Small Hands” — Barba has displayed an enviable gift for conveying, through an inventively abstract style, the strange worlds of childhood and early adolescence. The voice of this novel, precisely translated by Lisa Dillman, may have gained more traction if it had been channeled through one of its many children. As it stands, “A Luminous Republic” reads too often like a middling civil servant’s report: underlined by good intentions and promising themes, but ultimately unenlightening.