Nemesis by Misha Glenny

Book Review by Alan Bett | 29 Jun 2016
Book title: Nemesis
Author: Misha Glennny

Rocinha, a sprawling favela in Rio De Janeiro, compresses the population of a medium-sized city densely into a small town. Its weaving streets break off into unmapped capillaries to create a fiefdom enforced by forever youthful gang lords, their careers cut short by crackling automatic gunfire. Nemesis focuses into a single life within the teaming mass – Nem of Rocinha, a long-serving king of the traffickers. It is also a wider social history of the Favela drug economy which occupies the vacuum left by the state; a wide lens view of the global cycle which sucks in ‘the arms manufacturers of America, the traffickers of South America, and the coke habits of the middle classes from Berlin to Los Angeles.’

Misha Glenny (author of McMafia) builds a taut and thrilling narrative within this, and while his hands-on research is exemplary – especially considering he is working from a largely unwritten history – his treatment of Nem borders on the hagiographic. There are few on the streets of Rocinha willing to dispute this popular – and enforced – opinion. Then again, the Favela drug lords inhabit a complex role beyond our general comprehension of a criminal. They are the community's judge and jury; mayor and protector. The police match their brutality and corruption, but rarely their firepower. In depicting this world and its characters, Nemesis is a triumph: the violent, kinetic City of God brought up-to-date on the page. 

Out 7 July, published by Vintage, RRP £8.99