Progress and the Pueblo

Poor Man’s Wealth
by Rod Usher
Fourth Estate, 2011, 323 pages, $27.99

Rod Usher’s third novel begins with two epigraphs. The first is a quotation from Quadrant: Simon Caterson on hoaxes. The second is by Sir Philip Sidney, on sleep, the “poor man’s wealth” of the book’s title. The main, but not the only, hoax in the story concerns sleep.

We are in the dusty village of Higot, in a remote area of a country very like Spain, and the period is probably about forty or fifty years ago. Higot, never prosperous, is in decline. The bus service to its nearest town has been cancelled, and its main product, tobacco, which has always struggled in the fields against a vigorous local weed called retal, is no longer in its former demand.

The six local councillors convene to try to come up with some way to ensure the village’s survival. The only woman on the council, a little hairdresser called Petra but known as Gorrion (“Sparrow”) says, “I think we need a myth.”

The mayor, a big fellow known only as El Gordo (“The Fat Man”), who is also the story’s narrator, suggests a local epidemic of narcolepsy. Keeping their plan a secret among the six of them, they begin snatching sudden brief fake sleeps in public. The pleasure of dozing and the power of suggestion soon have many other villagers following unwittingly, and before long the sleeping phenomenon of Higot attracts attention from outside and a steady flow of curious visitors.

Higot’s economy improves with the influx, but of course tourism has its price, especially when the only attraction for tourists is the hope of catching one of the townsfolk napping, literally. Some businesses don’t benefit at all. Most of the tourist buses stay only for an hour or so, enough time for “fluids in, fluids out”, a bit of gawping, a few photographs, and the purchase of a trinket or two and perhaps the local goat’s cheese, now swathed in dried retal to make it look traditional. The local youth are soon buying motor-scooters and roaring around the formerly quiet streets.

Then the central government (of the junta in “the thirteenth year of Generalisimo Mordaz”) steps in. A man from the powerful Tourism & Coastal Waters ministry pays a visit, pointing out to El Gordo that the government has spent years and enormous amounts of money trying to modernise the country’s international image. Why, he asks rhetorically, “would we want a dust-and-flies pueblo like this one to threaten this structure” by promoting “the very image TCW has dedicated so much energy to suppress”? With all the subtle urbane menace of the senior official in the service of an authoritarian regime, he threatens the village with ruin if it persists: “I fear we will be forced to take measures.”

What can the conspirators—especially El Gordo and Gorrion, who now make up the council’s informal hoax sub-committee—do? What began as a hoax has become genuine. How can it be stopped without revealing the truth to the villagers and destroying Higot’s fragile faith in itself?

A few weeks later the road linking Higot with the rest of the country is mysteriously damaged so badly that buses can no longer reach the village, and the government shows no intention of repairing it; and there are vague suggestions from the capital of an obscure tobacco disease that might be about to infect the local crop. The exasperated El Gordo looks back and wonders, “Maybe we just needed to live our quiet lives without complaining. Was it all so bad?”

Eventually El Gordo does find a solution, with help from a most unexpected source, but it would be unfair to reveal it here, except to say that it provides a moving and satisfying ending, and that it involves another hoax, or perhaps two connected hoaxes, but this time the deceit is morally unexceptionable.

In its gentle depiction of ordinary people trying their best despite their human shortcomings, and other people succumbing to theirs, Poor Man’s Wealth is reminiscent of Alexander McCall Smith’s novels about the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone. Like those novels, it also interweaves a story of unexpected love in early middle age with the main plot. Also like those novels, it eschews sensationalism and authorial exhibitionism, and makes art out of the everyday.