Book Review: Incident at La Junta

 May is No Place for Gringos Month !

Book Review: 'Incident at La Junta' by Oliver Lange 

2 / 5 Stars

'Incident at La Junta' (208 pp.) was published by Pocket Books in June, 1974, with a cover illustration by Hector Garrido. 

Oliver Lange (1927 - 2013) was the pseudonym of the U.S. author John Warren Wadleigh, who wrote a number of thrillers over the interval from 1958 to 1989. His 1971 novel 'Vandenberg' may have been an inspiration for the 1984 film Red Dawn, about resistance to a Soviet invasion of the U.S. Although Lange apparently never lived in Mexico, he did live for a time in a remote area of New Mexico.

'Incident at La Junta' is set in rural Mexico in the early 1970s (La Junta is a real village, located in the Municipality of Guerrero in the State of Chihuahua). Two Young Americans, Keith and Jocelyn, are driving a Volkswagen van around South of the Border in a somewhat haphazard effort to avoid interrogation at the hands of the FBI. It seems that despite their wholesome, Southern California appearances, Keith and Jocelyn have been involved in Weathermen- style domestic terrorism, mainly as an excuse for something wild and groovy to do. With the law closing in, they decide it's best to load up on firearms and traveler's checks, and relocate someplace where the FBI isn't likely to follow.

Once in La Junta things take a turn for the worse for our duo. The chief of police, the corpulent Chief Jimenez, is very much the law of the land and disinclined to observe Americano niceties such as Civil Rights and Due Process. And while Dr. Montenegro is a friendly enough man, with an advanced education and a fluency in English, he increasingly is worried about the advent of a febrile illness among the campesinos in the countryside. Worried enough to demand that a quarantine be imposed on La Junta and its environs. 

As Keith and Jocelyn are about to discover, La Junta during a disease outbreak definitely is No Place for Gringos..........

'Incident at La Junta' was a disappointment. While the cover blurbs would lead the reader to believe it's a thriller, in actuality it's a South of the Border treatment of the Camus novel 'The Plague'. This is unfortunate, since the novel's premise would have made for an engaging exploration of Mexican noir, generating a novel that could perhaps have been a predecessor to Kem Nunn's 2004 novel 'Tijuana Straits'. 

 Author Lange too-quickly abandons the book's fugitives-out-of-their-depth storyline to adopt a leisurely, meandering exploration of the effects of the epidemic and its quarantine on the inhabitants of La Junta. 

Jocelyn, in particular, becomes the novel's focus. The reader is made to understand, in labored fashion, that she is an exemplar of the self-absorbed, self-indulgent way of life Americans have come to expect as a natural state of being (indeed, at one point in the novel Jocelyn hums the New Seekers I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing, which in 1971 came to be an advertisement for Coca-Cola, to herself). 

Much contrasting is made between the earthy realism with which the Mexicanos live their lives amid the poverty and insularity of their village, and the casual ignorance that marks the behavior of the American protagonists as they blunder  their way through a country they are ill-equipped to understand.

The bulk of the narrative is given to internal monologues and philosophical conversations, which soon become tedious. It doesn't help matters that Lange imposes of some stilted, inane prose on his readers:

"'Cause Mananaland's a veritable sportsman's paradise ! It says so in all the tour books," Keith said. "After all, Jocey, I shot my first Canadian goose when I was eight."

"God save my soul," Jocelyn said drearily. "I've got a freaking sportsman on my hands." She sneered at him. "Blasting little chippies. What's in it ?"

"Thrill of the hunt. Pukka sahib ! A Jungian to my caveman heritage", Keith said agreeably. "It turns you off ?"

"It do indeed."

"Why, there was a time, Jocey, when you would have done in half the country if you'd had the chance. But popping off a lil' bitsy bird - "

"Not on your life", she maintained.

By the time I got to the closing chapters of 'Incident' I was simply trying to finish the book. There is something of a 'shock' denouement, but at that point in my journey through the pages of 'Incident' I didn't really care.

Summing up, those interested in an existential presentation of rural Mexico, featuring a cast of idiosyncratic characters, may find 'Incident at La Junta' rewarding, but I suspect everyone else can avoid this novel without penalty.