Soccer, the politics of identity, and magic collide in this powerfully written, frequently troubling, always gripping story of kidnap and voodoo set in Puerto Rico.
Paul Faustino, South America’s premier sports journalist, is meant to be relaxing and researching his book in San Juan, but finds himself dragged against his will, first by his own insatiable journalist’s curiosity, eventually in a more sinister sense, into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of El Brujito, ‘The Magician’: a teenage football prodigy. One of the great strengths of Mal Peet as a storyteller and a writer is that none of his characters, least of all his protagonists, are ever completely likeable: Faustino is sarcastic, sometimes to the point of cruelty; he is also occasionally lazy, selfish, and somewhat prone to distraction by beautiful women and men.
The reader is immersed in evocative descriptions of South America, which are sprinkled with rich details: “in this part of the world kidnapping’s the second most popular sport after football”, opines one cynical journalist; “[Paul] embarked on a five-course meal that involved both scrambled eggs and chocolate cake … stoke up with calories early in the day then eke them out … [through] the humidity”; characters eat meals cooked in “palm oil” and walk on “harshly cobbled streets”.
Interwoven with this story is a first person, stream of consciousness account of an African man being torn from his home to work as a slave in the sugar plantations of the Americas. These sections have a lyrical, almost hallucinatory quality about them, which, juxtaposed with the naked brutality of what is being described – the horrors of the mid-Atlantic passage; a man seeing his wife being raped; the almost unimaginably harsh conditions on the plantations – only make them more disturbing. Mal Peet’s writing here has a profoundly upsetting beauty even as he describes appalling things.
“The air was so full of screaming that I could hardly breathe it.”
“I thought I would … wander this water desert forever.”
The way these stories are interlinked and start to melt into one another is strange, disquieting and utterly riveting.
The reader is also made to feel complicit in some of the story’s darker themes. This is a novel which deals with slavery and its legacy. Paul Faustino is made by a tour guide to stand in the same position as a captive African man would in a former slave market; at another point, the journalist watches a ritual based on the ancestor worship of the slaves. To what extent is this cultural appropriation from a civilization from which white men have already stolen everything? To what extent is it actually helping to keep these traditions and beliefs alive? Are the people performing the rituals in a sense prostituting their own heritage for white tourists’ amusement as a necessary way to preserve it? For you, the reader, who keeps turning the pages regardless, expecting to be entertained by Mal Peet – what’s your stake in this debate? Are you entirely neutral?
Of course, to some extent The Penalty stands and falls on whether or not it is a good football novel. Luckily, some of Mal Peet’s most exquisite writing describes the heart-stopping, adrenaline-fuelled motion of a football game: “Brujito would, somehow, by some outrageous magic, get the ball into it”. Mal Peet is clearly writing from the point of view of a football lover, not just an author trying to engage young people by writing about the beautiful game.
Mal Peet once said that “Writing is a form of licensed madness”, arguing that if he tried to imagine what it would be like to be a ‘black South American football superstar’ or a pregnant ‘female pop celebrity’ in public he would be sectioned. I think that reading Mal Peet’s novel The Penalty is a form of mind-altering experience; you enter a world so completely alien to your own, and don’t return quite the same.
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