One Year of Ugly by Caroline MacKenzie

No-one is a mystery to their beautician. Working in the glamour industry will teach you more about personality and motivation than any academic study. I’d love to tell the story of Troy from the point of view of the slave girl who threaded Helen’s eyebrows, describe the Napoleonic wars in the voice of Josephine’s maid or describe the challenges facing Lady Macbeth’s manicurist. ‘Out, out, damned liver spot!’

‘One Year of Ugly’ comes close to fulfilling my ambition. Mackenzie’s characters are physically attractive, sensual and committed to looking their best, even when they’re staring down the barrel of a gun. For refugees, a willingness to pluck, wax and spray the bodies of the wealthy ensures that you and your children can eat. Although Yola is the lead character, it is her Mamá who is revealed as a true hero, ensuring the survival of her large, transplanted family through her skills as a beautician. In exile, her salon rings with ‘the tinkling laughter of the financially secure’.

Having escaped crumbling, socialist Venezuela, Yola Palacios and her family are settling into their new under-the-radar life in Trinidad.

Yola narrates her tale with intelligence, humour and passion. The eldest child of happily married parents, living with her warm and loving extended family, she describes their antics with affection and razor-sharp wit. At a Sunday barbecue, Yola’s younger sister and female cousins, all large-assed and tiny-waisted, flick their ‘Princess Jasmine manes’. Meanwhile, her brother tells tales of uncles ‘legendary for their drinking prowess’ and snogs his nubile step-cousin, the elder of two offspring fathered ‘on the side’ by their late aunt’s husband. Yola, who was close to Celia, describes these youngsters as having ‘wriggled out of the woodwork.’ When they are instantly welcomed by the Palacios, she puts it down to ‘the female impulse to forgive and justify the picaresque wanderings of the male member.’

But when the formidable (read ‘family bitch’) Aunt Celia dies, the Palacios discover that she’s been keeping one hell of a secret. She’s seriously in debt to a local criminal called Ugly, a debt that is now theirs to repay.

Aunt Celia’s debt was built up for the very best of reasons, the education of her daughters. Her long marriage to a handsome criminal left her without any financial security. In difficult circumstances, she found the best solution available, which happened to be Ugly. When Yola, a translator who writes in her spare time, finds the manuscript of Celia’s autobiography, she sees it as an opportunity to explore her beloved aunt’s philosophy that ‘life is a big piece of sugar cane’. Reading it, she learns more about herself and is inspired to develop her literary ambitions. However, it’s hard to focus on creative writing when a gangster has packed your house with illegal immigrants, and you’re sharing the bathroom with a troupe of lap dancers.

He might dress like David Bowie, but Ugly’s business style is pure Pablo Escobar. What he says, the Palacios must do, otherwise: big trouble.

Ugly appears infrequently, but whenever he shows up in his snug snakeskin trousers, terrifying things happen to the Palacios family. Although Yola must accept the gangster’s power over her and those she loves, she cannot bring herself to totally submit to his domination. Her attitude is summed up when she says, ‘I couldn’t bring myself to swallow my anger and kiss the oppressing hand just because it had the dual power to protect.’  

However, when Ugly tries to go legitimate by opening a smart ‘gentlemen’s club’ and the Palacios are roped in as staff, Yola describes his operation and the personalities involved in it with relish. Her account of how the strippers try to control the system, by managing their own finances, deserves a place in a women’s history textbook, and I laughed out loud at her comment on the performers’ dressing room. ‘Vaginas abounded, and I never knew until that moment how rich God’s vagina tapestry truly was.’

Ugly’s right-hand man Román is tasked with keeping an eye on the family but Yola can barely keep her eyes off him. Forbidden fruit is the original aphrodisiac, and when Yola and Román fall in lust, even bigger trouble is on the horizon…

Román is hot. Very. Read about their first meeting, in Yola’s own words.

‘During that sexually charged stare-down, I felt all those stale old clichés. I had the sensation of being incredibly alive and invigorated, like I’d just slipped beneath the cool ocean on a hot day, like I’d just jumped out of a plane with the clouds rushing up to meet me. I felt every delicious, sentient thing I’d ever seen, smelled, touched, tasted, like a syringe of adrenaline had been rammed into my chest. It was lust. Pure wet, messy, make-your-toes-curl lust. The kind that makes you do stupid things like sleep with dangerous men.’

Yola jumps into bed with her oppressor. To be fair, when Román isn’t stalking her family or snapping people’s fingers, he’s reading quality literature, so they have something in common.

‘Wasn’t that what life was all about anyway….drawing whatever sweetness you could from that shit-covered sugarcane?’

What did I love about this book?

‘One Year of Ugly’ illuminates the chaotic economic situation in Venezuela, with its disastrous knock-on effect on the people of Trinidad, in a way no broadsheet article ever could. MacKenzie cleverly opens her story at the home of a loving, inclusive and eccentric family, which establishes the dominant mood of the book. By the time it becomes clear that the sufferings of the Palacios are based in reality, the reader is laughing so much that the politics lesson is absorbed without pain.

What would I change?

I’d probably suggest a different ending, but that’s true of most books I read.

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