Set in a fictional Latin American republic, Lost City Radio depicts the trauma inflicted upon a society when these freedom fighters—be they vigilantes or soldiers on the side of the government—simply disappear.
The book takes its title from a popular radio show in what Alarcon describes as the nation's "provincial capital." Each Sunday, the station broadcasts the names of the disappeared. "The idea was simple. How many refugees had come to the city? How many of them had lost touch with their families? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?"
The voice connecting the lost with the found belongs to Norma, a brave, beautiful and damaged journalist whom Alarcon brings vividly to life. Her husband, Rey, has been missing for more than a decade.
Alarcon's portrait of the emotional toll this loss takes on Norma is heartrending. A decade later, she still sleeps alone, facing the door to her bedroom, as if Rey might still come home in the night.
Lost City Radio then cycles backward to tell the story of the country's war, the way it fractured the committed from the fearful, the urban from the rural and the collaborative from the resistant.
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Based on Alarcon's descriptions, the country might be Argentina or Chile or the author's native Peru—all countries racked by civil wars and state-sponsored disappearances. But the observations this book makes aren't limited to Latin America, especially when it comes to the siren call of violence.
"Before the war began, those of Norma's generation still spoke of violence with awe and reverence," Alarcon writes, "cleansing violence, purifying violence, violence that would spawn virtue."
It doesn't take long for the society to realize that the fire next time can become the fire all the time—fires that burn indiscriminately, torching neighborhoods and families, the innocent and the guilty together. Indeed, these blazes become one of the most compelling metaphors of Lost City Radio.
At the heart of the book is a secluded piece of scorched earth called the Moon, where political prisoners are taken and buried in pits and baked in the sun, tortured, sometimes burned to death. Rey survives, but is scarred by nightmares.
Like many of his compatriots, Rey remains quiet about his experience at first, lest he be sent back. Then he finally asks a family member, who works at a jail, why he never asked Rey what happened to him while he was away. "I work in a prison," the man responds. "I know exactly what they did to you."
This novel would feel like a political tract were it not so skillful at portraying the moral insanity of war. Lost City Radio reveals how hard it is to separate villains from victims, killers from the killed.
The novel's key plot revolves around a boy who is sent from a village to the city to have a list of names read on Norma's show. His appearance sets off a chain of events which show how all of the characters are more connected than it at first appears.
Alarcon is still in his late 20s, but he manages the complicated plot mechanisms this storyline requires like a veteran. Even more impressively, though, time and again he resists the urge to bring the anvil of judgment down upon any one of his characters.
And so we emerge from this impressive political fable with a profound sense of loss, of rage, and a clarifying glimpse into the futility of violence. "What does the end of a war mean," Alarcon writes, "if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?"