Everyone’s a victim

From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors, their experiences and relationship driving the story’s developments, but these magnetic central characters are people-traffickers and kidnappers, capable of startling violence and dehumanising cruelty. And truly, they’re very much in love.

For most of the novel, Estela and Epitafio are apart, having left the jungle clearing where the book opens to drive their respective consignments of human cargo to their destinations. Theirs is a single story — what happens to one has consequences for the other — told along parallel tracks. Much time is spent fretting about getting a signal to phone each other, because Estela has something vital to tell Epitafio; the tension escalates as they struggle to have that conversation. We move back and forth between them, the man who so loves Estela and the woman who so adores Epitafio — that’s how they’re often presented to us, defined only by their love for each other.

The jumps between strands of the story often happen mid-sentence, a neat trick that just adds to the pull this book exerts on its readers. You’re fully 200 pages in before you realise where you’ve been led, and how high the stakes have become. Though Estela and Epitafio seem, at least temporarily, in control of their own fate, the world they inhabit (which feels mythic, but really is probably less fictional than we’d like to believe) makes victims of just about everybody. Violence is shockingly easy to resort to here, and control is only ever contingent; we glimpse plotting and power plays, with grimly predictable consequences. Though our perspective is often very close to theirs, we see things the characters don’t, and mostly these things are threats.