Based on the blurb I was reasonably sure THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR wasn’t going to be my kind of thing but I occasionally get suckered by the nagging quadrant of my brain into worrying that if I only ever read things I think I will like I will miss out on good and/or horizon-expanding reading. Sometimes this turns out to be true (e.g. Ken Bruen’s THE DRAMATIST). And sometimes it doesn’t.

Horace “Horse, as in hung like a…” Mann feels guilty. Before he felt guilty he felt angry so he left his ex-wife, the child that wasn’t really his but for whom he is financially responsible and the country he no longer wants any part of. He ended up in Lima, Peru where his personal life turns into a genuine horror. Hence the guilt.

Horse teaches English to the city’s criminals (so they can more successfully rob the kind of tourists that Horse disdains) and is a minor drug dealer. He has made ‘friends’ with a sociopath called Pitt Watters who is the American ambassador’s son and a CIA killer. When he disappears Pitt’s mother, whom Horse sometimes has sex with, asks Horse to try to find him. Which he proceeds to do. Very, very slowly.

The opening hundred or so pages of THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR include scenes in which the main character snorts cocaine off a urine-splashed toilet, has trouble finding a place on his body where he hasn’t already burned himself with cigarettes which is his preferred form of self-harm (for the record he chooses an armpit on this occasion), is taken to a bondage club in which a man is whipped until he bleeds for the entertainment of others, has a conversation with his friend’s wife while she removes her vibrator from an orifice and puts it, wet and sticky, on the coffee table between them and has his head plunged into a bucket of shit. The remaining 300 or so pages contain an equal number of similar scenes but I think you get the point.

This is the best evidence I can give of the sensibility of the novel. If all of that sounds like your thing then by all means track down a copy (one of you is welcome to mine if you ask nicely). If it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea then give the book a miss because there is a lot more of the same.

In fact to me it is an endless series of such happenings with little in the way of connecting narrative (though to be fair there is more story in the second half of the novel) (there’s still a lot of violence and bodily fluids but some stuff does happen). Even so, with barely any agency at all Horse lurches around the seediest parts of Peru allowing himself to die. Slowly. Via a series of flashbacks he does tell the reader what terrible event has led to this sorry state of affairs but as the core of this horror is given away by the book’s blurb much of the suspense that might otherwise have been provided here is effectively obliterated. And even in what is objectively a (if not the) defining moment of his miserable life everything happens to Horse or around him.

I’ve no earthly clue who the ideal reader of this book would be. My noir-adoring friend wasn’t intrigued enough by the blurb to take the free copy I tried to press upon him and now, having read it, I cannot think of a single person I know to whom I would suggest it. As a white, Australian, woman who would be considered middle-class with a smattering of exotic travel and one or two of the average human being’s troubles in my background I have absolutely no frame of reference for this novel. Twenty years ago I’d have seen this as some kind of personal flaw on my part. Now I just count my blessings. I am entirely comfortable…indeed grateful…that I don’t ‘get’ this novel.

I am prepared to admit that my lack of connection to anything going on here is not entirely the book’s fault (with me never having been a self-destructive, America-hating, bloke with an enormous penis) it’s not something I’m going to accept much blame for either. I didn’t have anything in common with the people depicted in Sean Doolittle’s LAKE COUNTRY either and I loved it. The differences, for me, are in the presence of a recognisable narrative structure and in the tenderness Doolittle clearly felt for life’s outsiders. Because of that I could, and did, develop my own relationship with the ‘designated loser’ in that novel, even though I couldn’t easily relate his situation (as a rage-fuelled, near-alcoholic, ex-soldier) to anything from my own experience. I’ve no clue what, if any, emotions Porup feels towards the mess of a human being he has created in Horse (or Pitt or Pitt’s mother or Pitt’s father or Horse’s ex or any of the other human detritus that populates this tome). All I know for sure is that he didn’t do anything to make me care whether any of them lived or died, though I’d certainly have been chirpier about it all if their collective fate had taken less than 400 pages to arrive.

One of the things I normally give a bit of thought to at the end of a book is what the author might have been trying to achieve with it and whether or not they managed it. I’m sure I’m often wildly inaccurate but it’s rare that I can’t make a stab at it. Here I’ve no idea. Shock? If so it failed in my case because there was too much awfulness. Each incident of sad debauchery mixed with violence followed so closely on the heels of its predecessor that there’s no time to process any of them at an emotional level. Entertain? I am confident I am (for once) one of the majority of readers who would find the tone and language of this novel too far outside their comfort zone for it to be enjoyable for all but a few. Inform? I suppose the “America is evil” theme is vaguely educational but this message is bludgeoned into proceedings rather than being deftly laid out and in my experience that kind of heavy-handedness rarely attracts new converts. Even many (most?) of those already converted to this way of thinking would, I’d wager, prefer a less crude and violent preacher.

Whatever the intent, for me reading THE SECOND BAT GUANO WAR was a chore. Not the kind of chore that is hard work but ultimately satisfying. Just the kind that is hard work. The level of violence and crudity was too high and mostly gratuitous (i.e. being without apparent reason). The pace was slow, indeed glacial for the first half of the novel, due to the aimless ‘narrative’ and repetition of basic elements (how many scenes of seemingly pleasure-free auto-erotic masturbation are needed to indicate the rockiest of bottoms has been reached?). The imagery ranged from plain awful (with almost everyone being described via some reference to their sexual organs) to outright silly (Pitt’s wife, for example, is introduced with these words “…her eyes blue balls of fire. Another cock-hungry American whore”…”she cocked those blue balls of fire sideways, as if taking aim with a shotgun”). I did not find any of it funny or thought-provoking or engaging or any of the other things that might have made it worth my time. If that makes me boring or bourgeois or close-minded…meh.

The Second Bat Guano War is the story of one man's quest to find his friend and in the process stop a war. The friend, however, works for the CIA and is enmeshed with drugs, dissidents, and disappearances in Bolivia.

I did not like this book for several reasons. First, much of the story is told as flash-backs -- long flash-backs which sometimes go on and on. At some points, I had difficulty figuring out was it a flash-back or not. Second, the 'hero' of the book is cocaine snorting American living in Bolivia with a dark secret. I didn't like him and, honestly, I didn't care if he was killed or not. Ditto with most of the other characters. Third, the plot plodded. The subtitle of this book was "A Hard-Boiled Spy Thriller", so I was expecting lots of action, intrigue, and mystery. But there was little of this. Even the sections where there was action seemed flat in the telling. And finally, the most fatal flaw in my mind was that until 75% through the book, there was no clear threat. Thrillers usually have a clear threat towards the beginning -- something which the characters are fighting to prevent -- but this one did not, or only had a minor hint of one.

I read this book to the end because (1) I felt an obligation to read it as it was from Member Giveaway and (2) I had hoped it would improve as it reached the climax. In hindsight, I wish I had stopped after the first 2-3 chapters. Overall, I would not recommend this book. ( )