The message is simultaneously uplifting and painful: There is a grim symbiosis that unites corrupt and stupid governments with drugs and arms dealers in a feeding frenzy that destroys not just people but civilisation itself. Love and justice can be victorious, but only the kind of love that has more to do with self-sacrifice than romance, and only the kind of justice that is prepared to confront evil regardless of the cost. It's a profound but painful truth that only that strange hybrid of Marxism and Christianity called "Liberation Theology" has succeeded in developing systematically.

The book's principal stylistic flourish is "magical realism", a formula familiar to readers of Garcia Marquez and others. This piece of lit. crit. jargon means simply that magical events are an integral part of the plot, but, this being the world of po-mo, it only happens to make a point. In other words, the author does not require you to suspend disbelief as would be the case in a conventional magic story. This technique provides the opportunity for some of the book's most delicate and beautiful images, but on the downside it imposes a clumsy constraint on the author: He cannot narrate supernatural events directly and objectively - he has to do so in a subjective way from inside the head of one of his characters. This is not a criticism of the author - he executes this perceptual juggling with flawless technique. Rather, it is an indictment of the literary fashion that makes this sort of mannerism necessary. The self-distancing of the author from the world in which his characters live and move is unavoidably communicated to the reader, making it harder to engage with the characters or feel for them the way we would under the spell of a conventional narrative.

In this literary framework, only appalling suffering can draw us into the intensity of feeling for the characters that is necessary for the device to work. The story starts off in a light, satirical vain that will raise genuine rueful smiles and in its erotic moments even perhaps mildly titillate. The only searching question is whether he can reign the po-mo mannerisms in for long enough at a time to keep the story flowing, but Louis writes such beautiful prose that it is a pleasure to read. Nevertheless, the feelgood factor of the earlier chapters cannot last, and quite quickly the book descends into a nightmare of depraved violence. Louis narrates rape, torture, mutilation and so on with exactly the kind of elegant simplicity you would expect, and after the good humour of the early chapters the result is almost unbearably shocking.

I have some reservations as to whether even great literature should incorporate such graphic descriptions of sexual violence. I would certainly not wish to leave this book lying around the house where a young or impressionable person could be exposed to it. And in places Louis' literary technique almost gets the better of his artistic sensibility. Nevertheless, it stands as a remarkable achievement by a novelist of extraordinary gifts. If you are not afraid to laugh, cry and be sickened in one sitting, it is strongly recommended.

And as with all good music, there should be drink, there should be women and there should be magic. When these collide, of course, then there will be violence. In "Senor Vivo" there is, in abundance.

But it as vicious and as hard as it is romantic and poetic. And it is the balance of these factors - as with "Corelli" - that makes this book so fantastic, in both senses of the word. You can laugh and you can marvel at the tantric science of the President's lovemaking, but you will soon crumble at the prospect of what happens to Vivo's little Bugsita. The horror takes your breath away. And it is good for a book about the drugs trade to be so visceral. Amongst the fantasy there is a very real and very vivid truth being told.

The previous reviewer evidently disagrees. They are wrong. "Opinion, opinion..." you might well think, but no, then you would be wrong. It is not simply the facile "po-mo", "lit. crit." generally jargonese dismissal of magic realism that is misplaced (the magic of the book, in fact, is an evocation of the spiritual jungle and sierra Indians and their influence on the culture of this South American Erehwon), but the whole tenor of the argument is predicated on a lie. The book is not self-indulgent, it does not have an overarching personal agenda and it certainly does not disenfranchise the emotions of the reader. What it does is entertain, gloriously.

The narrative is never forced, but instead it plays out delicately in front of you with interweaving narratives and intimate portraits of endless fascinating characters. And yes, it does have a political message, but it is not forced down the reader's throat ("inexcusably pornographic", really, just no). Rather it cuts to the core in the most direct and clinical of ways. We may read about the coca trade in Colombia, but it's a far away, unrealised and dismissable problem - "yeah, I've heard there's a war going on over there. Don't suppose anyone cares though...they're all on drugs". In "Senor Vivo" the laughter dies on the cold reality of torture. And never are we more sober than when the joke is cut short.