Vicious (182 pages), called Criminal in Galician, is Xurxo Borrazás’ second and best-known novel, and won him the Spanish Critics’ Prize as well as the San Clemente Prize awarded by high-school readers.

A man is lying on the ground, at the entrance to the threshing floor. He’s been there for an hour, but no one has come by. The pain he felt has gone. A dog, Moino, is sniffing at his feet and lies down next to him. This is the Monteiro farmstead, which had belonged to Chucho Monteiro, the father. He had planted an oak grove with the help of his younger son, Daniel. On his death, his older son, also called Chucho, moved away with his wife to work in construction. Daniel looked after the farmstead and his mother, until she died two years later. At this point, the older son returned and suggested he also live at the farmstead and help out with the work, but all he did was live on the land, drinking and not helping, much to the chagrin of Daniel’s wife, Lola. Daniel’s son, also called Daniel, teaches the dog, Moino, to shake hands. He is very pleased with this trick and shows his mother and uncle. The two of them then go to meet Daniel as he comes back from the fields. Chucho is sitting at the boundary of the oak grove, sharpening a laurel stick. A woman, Carme, drives by on a tractor. He flirts with her and tries to persuade her to get off the tractor and talk for a while, but she refuses. Chucho is sitting by the fire in the kitchen, asking Lola for this and that. He tries to remember the little boy’s name, but mistakenly calls him Suso instead of Daniel. He invites Lola over and strokes her leg. They kiss. Lola thinks she did try to warn her husband.

The man on the ground has been dead since the day before. A pair of Civil Guard officers and a coroner arrive to remove the body. The dead man watches how his body is put in the hearse and Moino the dog goes to occupy the place on the ground where his body had been. Chucho is on the run, having committed a murder. He plans to make it to Coruña and from there to board a ship to Brazil or Cuba, to change his appearance so that he cannot be recognized. He is spotted as he leaves by a villager called Moncho, who is sitting up in a tree, collecting pine cones. Moncho, a simpleton, notices that Chucho is nervous and has obviously done something terrible. Moino the dog pursues Chucho for a time, is spotted by Moncho up in the tree and then backtracks, too small for the night. A newspaper reports on the crime, the murder of Daniel Monteiro at the hands of his brother, and on the disappearance of Chucho, Lola and Daniel’s son. Daniel’s son, also called Daniel, sees his mother slip on the ground, his uncle fussing behind him, his father isn’t there. An undertaker, Mr Ventura, issues a bill for a funeral. Chucho, on the run, falls and cuts his knee. He will make it to Coruña before dawn and then disappear.

The Civil Guard discovers the lifeless bodies of Lola and her young son, Daniel. They are determined to catch Chucho before he can flee the country. Moncho the simpleton gives evidence before the judge, a woman, about being up in the tree and seeing Chucho on the run and tries to hide his erection. A funeral is held for Daniel. People standing outside comment on the relationship between Chucho and Lola, who was quite a looker and pretty popular in her day. A man and a boy, accompanied by a dog, return from the fields on a cart laden high with corn; in the distance, a truck leaves with milk cans full of milk. Two officers of the Civil Guard come across a man limping along at two in the morning, with an injured knee, claiming to be searching for a lost pig. They let him go. We hear the voice of the author, the one who is responsible for creating the characters in the book. Chucho tries to seduce Lola, who is discontented with her life and misses the innocence of her childhood and youth. Chucho has made it to Coruña. He has a little over two hundred pesetas, but decides to hold on to these so he can get something to eat. He looks a state; a young girl walking her dog hurries past him.

The young Daniel and his father return from the fields; Daniel is telling his father how girls don’t have a willy, they only have a slit. They reach the farmstead, where Chucho is in the kitchen smoking a cigarette and Lola looks at her husband with an unsmiling expression. Daniel the son asks his father to make him some clogs and goes and collects the necessary tools from the shed. His uncle, Chucho, says he will do it for him. A newspaper column reflects on the Monteiro murders, in particular the fact a brother has killed his own brother, as in the Old Testament story, and a child was also killed. A young couple are returning from the beach. They start kissing while driving along. They are near Carballo when they run over a dog. The dog, Moino, realizes that his end has come. The boy driving the car is concerned that some liquid is leaking from the engine as a result of the impact and his father won’t let him drive the car again. A couple are at home with the woman’s father and their daughter. They are remarking on Daniel’s funeral and the number of people who were in attendance. The woman’s father thinks it’s just because people like a good gossip. The woman didn’t want her own daughter, who was in the same class as young Daniel, to attend; she doesn’t think a funeral is a place for children. Chucho is searching for a fishing boat or a merchant ship to take him away from Coruña, but he can’t get into the port’s installations. He takes a nap under a tree, where he is observed by passers-by and woken by a police officer, who offers him some coins and tells him he can’t sleep there. Chucho enters a bar, orders a coffee and falls asleep with his head on the counter.

At Mass the following Sunday, the church is full of parishioners; the priest drinks some of the communion wine and chastises the altar boy for doing the wrong things. There is a chapter full of incomplete, ungrammatical sentences, about a man and his sons, a woman, a cart, a dog, the night. Lola and her son Daniel are running away with Chucho, who has murdered his brother. Chucho is angry and keeps telling them to hurry along. Daniel is crying and asking for his father. Lola thinks about killing this man but, before she has a chance, he kills her instead, she hears her son crying out, and then the cries stop, the man rapes her dead body. Chucho is making his way to the port in Coruña. He’s willing to take any job on board a ship, just so long as it takes him to a foreign country and he can get a good night’s sleep. There are lots of young people hanging around outside bars and clubs. One young man picks a fight with Chucho, knees him in the groin and breaks one of his teeth. A younger Chucho is doing his military service, but is on leave. At a dance in the local town, he wants to kiss Lola. He takes her to a secluded place and forces her to make love, even though she doesn’t want to.

Chucho and Daniel leave the house to go and cut some firewood. Chucho holds the axe, which he raises above his head and drives into Daniel’s back, then his chest, killing him. Chucho is in England. He likes the pubs, the orderliness, the way everybody goes about their business without interfering. But he also misses the contact with friends, being able to talk to people and understand. Here, he doesn’t know English. He sometimes looks at himself from outside and laughs at himself. He is annoyed with that “vicious criminal” who forced him to leave Galicia behind. He flirts with an Irish barmaid in a pub, holds on to her hand and leaves her some coins. Chucho has got a job on board the Homeland, a ship that trawls in the North Sea. His plan is to disembark in an English or an Irish port and see what happens from there. He makes friends on board the ship with another Galician and they share a smoke. Then he goes to get some sleep. Chucho Monteiro is with his sons in the oak grove, they are catching crickets to take home with them, the younger Chucho is tetchy, says he always does what he wants. Chucho has a better relationship with his other son, Daniel, who is calmer and better-natured. Daniel has a loose tooth, so his father takes it out with a bit of string. Daniel goes to show the tooth to his brother, wondering how much he’ll get for it from the fairies, but Chucho takes the tooth and smashes it with a hammer. Periphery kills for the sake of life and gets drunk on death; it flees from burning, scorching memory. Chucho, in a rage, tells himself to stick the blade of the axe harder into his brother’s back and chest.

Chucho, on board the Homeland, dreams of a better outcome when he and his brother go to cut some firewood. The brothers joke with each other, Chucho hugs his nephew close and takes him upstairs to put him to bed, leaving Daniel and Lola alone downstairs. A girl visits a shoemaker’s, where news about the Monteiro murders is on the radio. The shoemaker remarks that one of the people to discover Daniel Monteiro’s body had been in his workshop at exactly the same time as an interview with him was being emitted on the radio. In England, Chucho goes to get himself a haircut, so he can look respectable. In the barber’s, he meets a fellow Galician. They chat about this and that, and then the other Galician, Manolo de Andrade, asks Chucho if he’s heard about the murder of this entire family. Chucho says he hasn’t, he must have been at sea when it happened. The local priest calls the Civil Guard to say he has spotted Chucho Monteiro hanging out with the Gypsies on Seoane Road in Galicia; he suggests they pull down the slums and drive those people out, they’re a bad influence. Two drunk men visit the Monteiros’ oak grove at night to cut down some wood and sell it in town. One of them is reluctant to steal from the dead, but the other says it’s public land already, they’re not stealing from anybody and, if they don’t, the Council will just come and take the wood.

In England, Chucho has a drink with Manolo de Andrade, who has a wife and daughter in Galicia, but says he can’t get an erection whenever he wants to be with a woman over there. Chucho waits in the car park of a pub until a young barmaid comes out. He remembers the time when he saw his brother, Daniel, go off with Lola and warned him not to have anything to do with her. He follows the barmaid until she’s in open country, then forces her to the ground, rips off her clothes, but is unable to get an erection. He cries out for his mother, and the woman calls him a bastard. Words are used to talk for the sake of talking; written words are equally worthless. They don’t go much further than a confused mishmash containing other writings, an imperfect, biased vision of an unreal, ideal order, and that is why the world will never know about Chucho or take an interest in him. Chucho and Lola return from the clearing where Chucho has raped her. Lola has briefly fainted. When she comes to, she puts her finger in her vagina and feels some of Chucho’s semen. She walks back to the town, telling him never even to dare to address her again. For her, it’s as if he’s dead and buried. Meanwhile, Daniel, only a boy at this time, is asleep in bed. Chucho is standing by the railway tracks, waiting for the approach of a fast train. There are no trains in the village where he comes from. A train does not swerve, it does not deviate. A few minutes earlier, he has gone up to a window and asked for a ticket to Glasgow.

This is a compelling narrative which sets the simplicity, but also the ugliness, of rural life against the orderliness and tidiness of modern life. Chucho seems to be ill at ease in both kinds of life: in the rural environment, he is a layabout who doesn’t help very much and only wants to hang out with women; in the ordered life of England, he is similarly incapable of blending in. The only place where he seems to find a moment’s peace is in his bunk on the ship the Homeland, when he dreams of a better relationship with his brother and with Lola. The novel Vicious is well written and fast-paced. There is a glimpse of the narrator in a couple of the chapters, and even in a footnote. There is also an interesting use of flashback, the author interweaving different scenes, times and viewpoints. Vicious is considered one of the most ambitious and successful novels to have been written in Galician.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne