Curandera

In 17th century Cape Verde, healer Zulmira arrives in the town of Gethsemane and is taken in to live as housekeeper to Domingos, his sick wife, and his young daughter. The locals are suspicious of a stranger in their midst, but recognise her talents as a folk healer and bring to her the ailing, the blind and the mad to be cured. But Zulmira is not simply a healer, she is also a shaman in communion with the god Oni, who demands retribution down through generations and centuries.

Zulmira’s place in Gethsemane becomes complicated by her love for Domingos and for his daughter, Sueli, who exhibits violent shamanic talents of her own. When men are suddenly blinded, children disappear, and infertile women become pregnant, the town turns on Zulmira and accuses her of sorcery.

In present-day London, botanist Therese draws to her Finn, Azacca and Emilien, the four of them bound together by their fascination with ritual, and each carrying a shamanic inheritance from a different culture. Using a combination of the drug peyote and ritual, they open up a portal to Oni, the shaman god, a link which simultaneously transports everyday life above the mundane and brings with it pain, suspicion and addiction. Through the portal, they are able to travel to Oni and to Zulmira, and past and present begin to blur. As their craving for the world Oni has created increases, so do Oni’s demands for sacrifice, leaving behind a trail of violent death.

This is a startlingly original book, written in lush, evocative language that is by turns beautifully elegiac and sharply brutal. Reflecting the hallucinogenic experience of shamanic trance itself, imagery piles on imagery in sequences that blur reality and metaphor. At times, sentences are piled high with untethered pronouns and subclauses and meaning itself becomes slippery. The richly textured style of the novel creates a deeply immersive and at times unsettling reading experience, with images that haunted me long after turning the last page. Perhaps the most startling image is that of one of the ‘gifts’ that comes through the portal: a ribcage of bones and blood vessels on which grow moss and edible fruits; a lesson that when people travel through the portal they don’t necessarily arrive whole.

The characters in Curandera are acutely drawn, each suffering a sense of alienation and loss, whether that’s from lack of a home, sexual jealousy, or yearning for a life beyond the mundane. The claustrophobia of a shared home is brilliantly evoked in both settings, and in both, the home is the location for powerfully destructive desires. The characters’ flaws and the inescapability of their shamanic heritage drive the narrative, screwing the tension tighter to a shocking conclusion.

If you like your crime novels to include a problem to solve, a detective, clues, red herrings, and a wrapped up ending, this book is not for you. In fact, it’s a struggle to describe this as a crime novel in any traditional sense at all, despite the violent deaths it contains. It might be more accurately defined as literary fantasy. But Curandera’s exploration of obsession and atavistic inheritance encourages reflection on the crime genre: to what extent characters are defined and bound by their situations, and whether a wrong committed in one lifetime can be avenged in a later one. Most terrifying of all is the thought that there might walk amongst us people who seem ordinary but who have the ability to see illness, emotion and esoteric realms, and who will do anything to maintain and increase their powers.