Calling Roberto Bolano's 2666 a novel is somewhat misleading. Certainly, it bears many attributes of a work of long fiction - memorable characters, richly evoked locations, abundant action, recurrent themes. Nevertheless, the author is clearly working against the genre even as he labours within it; at times, he turns the common conventions of the novel on their head, whether by exiling a character that the reader has come to identify as a protagonist, or amputating storylines just as they start to pulse with life. The fact that the book remains as riveting as any top-notch thriller is testament to Bolano's astonishing virtuosity.

Perhaps 2666's sad provenance is the reason for this narrative disquiet. Completed just before Bolano's death in July 2003 at the age of 50, it was provisionally intended to be five separate books, although the author's executors and editors decided posthumously to bring it out as a single work. It was the right decision. Read as a whole, 2666, whose enigmatic title is never explained in the text, achieves something extremely rare in fiction: it provides an all-encompassing view of our world.

The novel opens in Europe, where four literary scholars are brought together by a mutual obsession with Benno von Archimboldi, a prolific but elusive German author. A chance meeting leads them to a minor Mexican novelist known as El Cerdo (the Pig), who claims to have spent a chaotic day with Archimboldi in Mexico City as the great writer was en route to the fictional border city of Santa Teresa (which bears a strong resemblance to Ciudad Juarez). After travelling there, the scholars find scant trace of their prey, though they do discover that a serial killer has slaughtered hundreds of young women in the city over the past decade.

As Archimboldi's trail runs cold, Bolano does what young novelists are told never to do - he drops his protagonists for new ones, in this case a Chilean scholar named Amalfitano, who has washed up in Santa Teresa with his teenage daughter, and an African-American journalist known as Oscar Fate, who has come to Mexico to cover a boxing match, only to become fixated by the murders. “No one pays attention to these killings,” Fate believes, “but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” In one of the novel's more remarkable moments (and that's saying something), his investigations lead him to a terrifying confrontation with the main suspect in a desert prison.

Abandoning Fate, Bolano once again changes tack to give us the history of the murders. Although a weary police detective named Juan de Dios Martinez might be called this section's protagonist, the real hero (or antihero) is the city of Santa Teresa itself, a teeming dystopia in which the bodies of raped and mutilated young women are discovered almost weekly, often in garbage dumps surrounding the low-paying factories that manufacture cheap goods for American consumption. While some of the cases are domestic disputes or collateral in the drug trade, most seem to be the work of a sadist working out of an expensive black sedan. The authorities hope a high-profile arrest will quell rising fear and resentment, although any sense of relief is tempered by the fact that the killings continue after the suspect is banged up in prison.

Bolano then comes full circle in the book's last section by returning the focus to Archimboldi, presenting a remarkable biography of the writer from his birth in pre- Nazi Germany to his life as an itinerant cult novelist who possesses little more than a laptop and a backlist. Any sense that Bolano has gone off track is dispelled in the novel's final pages, when the author miraculously draws together plot lines that seemed almost fatally irreconcilable.

What is most memorable about 2666 is the sheer abundance of its narrative. Bolano mints characters with a spendthrift generosity, though there is nothing preening about this breadth of scope. A Mexican seer who describes the world as being “a kind of tremor”, an English artist whose most popular work contains his own severed hand, a former Black Panther who writes cookbooks, a prodigiously endowed Romanian general - it is sometimes easier to think of this book in terms of who is not present, rather than who is.

Bolano is equally unstinting with his subplots, which spring organically from the novel, like the colourful offshoots of a rampant tropical plant. Perhaps the most memorable of these comes in 2666's final section, which details Archimboldi's service in the German army during the second world war. While in Romania, he finds himself stationed in a castle that might have been the home of Count Dracula. There, he witnesses an act of brutal lovemaking that seems to conjure the vampire's ghost. Later, while a prisoner of war, he hears the harrowing confession of a fellow soldier that serves as a bitter distillation of the general slaughter that has just decimated the world.

It is in stories such as this that the world of 2666 can be best experienced - one that is equal parts beauty and violence. When Professor Amalfitano arrives in Santa Teresa, he remarks that “the sky...was purple like the skin of an Indian woman beaten to death”; when a German officer visits the site of the massacre of Jews he has reluctantly ordered, he cannot bring himself to stare into the abyss of the mass grave. “From now on,” he thinks, “this is the realm of the insects.”

The novel's most representative story comes when Amalfitano leads the European scholars on a wild-goose chase to a shabby circus simply because it features a German magician who might be their vanished author. “Examined coolly, it was a stupid idea...but the critics were in such low spirits that he thought it wouldn't hurt.” In an era where number-crunching publishers are turning out one coolly formulaic book after another, this awe-inspiring three-ring extravaganza of a novel is sure to raise a reader's spirits as much as any Mexican circus.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
Picador £20 pp898

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