El Dorado Shuffle

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Vancouver writer Morgan Nyberg has won the Governor General’s Award
for his juvenile fiction. El Dorado Shuffle, his first adult novel,
relates the adventures of Angus McNight, who is known as Mac or Maquito
to his friends in the Andean country where he teaches English. Following
the death of his first wife and his son (through a drug overdose), this
“ugly Canadian” takes advantage of his position to seduce his
students. Eventually coerced into marriage with Monserrat—daughter of
the Chief of the Armed Forces, who later becomes President of the
Republic—Mac is appointed Second Deputy of Strangers as a reward.

Our anti-hero encounters a host of characters, including Liz the
English teacher, Isman the Arab terrorist, and a succession of
larger-than-life military leaders, drug dealers, prostitutes, and “CIA
jerks” who are involved in coups and countercoups, cocaine deals, drug
wars, and the like. (As if the living weren’t bad enough, Mac also
communes with the ghosts of his wife and son.) Eventually Mac finds
himself teaching English in the Far East while his young Latin wife and
his new baby settle in Boston. In the end, Mac finally accepts life as
it is: he plans his return to the West and to the satisfaction of family
life. Given Mac’s behavior to this point, readers of this
action-packed tale may be forgiven for taking the moral ending with a
grain of salt.