Book of the week

The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantu´ (Bodley Head) $35

Blazing heat. Death in the desert. Abandoned baggage. Ever-present helicopters. Drones and robotic eyes. Ceaseless human patrols.

This isn’t sci-fi. It is the contemporary border between the United States and Mexico.

The boundary seemed ‘‘arbitrarily chosen’’, even to its initial surveyors. Now it is one of the most contentious borders in the world. Mexicans cross it illegally to seek a new life in the US. Drug shipments travel north to fill America’s insatiable demand for cocaine and marijuana.

President Trump has further politicised it. His dream of a ‘‘beautiful wall’’ along the border is a Biblical fantasy that has reached deep into the minds of a conservative American electorate.

Francisco Cantu´ ’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border is a memoir of his time as an American border patrol agent and intelligence officer. It is sharply observed reportage from one of the world’s critical geosocial locations.

To be a border agent is to become a human bulwark against a movement of people in search of better things.

America’s southern border is haunted by death. Children die of thirst as they try to cross. Body after body is found in the mesquite scrub. Illegal immigrants are hunted mercilessly. The lucky ones are deported back to Mexico.

The first of the book’s three sections describes Cantu´ ’s experiences as an agent dealing with illegal immigrants – the Mexicans seeking better pay or reunion with family members in the US, along with the ever-present drug-runners. With electronic sensors, informants, and known trails, the ability to cross successfully into America is dramatically hindered.

Cantu´ makes the general tragedy into an individual one. Incidents and encounters are swift and dramatic. Everyone has a story. The short chapters flash with personalised adrenaline.

The memoir’s second part deals with Cantu´ ’s discovery as an intelligence officer that the moral compromises he makes on a daily basis are just as surely eroding his own humanity.

The Line Becomes a River is far more than a first-person narrative. It’s a real feet-on-the-ground exploration of an arbitrary line and the conflicts of conscience it creates.

To be a border agent is to become a human bulwark against a movement of people in search of better things. Desensitisation and burn-out are both destructive. Cantu´ ’s sleep is filled with teeth-grinding nightmares. A figure of a wolf constantly hovers over him.

Cantu´ is a subtle writer. He frames contemporary events with historic precedents and he has an eye for the telling detail. The Line Becomes a River is a journalistic triumph. – David Herkt