In an interview on Mexico

Your next book is The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela.

I first read this when I was 16 or 17 and it made a strong impression on me. It’s a tough, picaresque novel of the Mexican revolution and of what it was like for the soldiers in the north. It’s a good account of how anarchic that revolution must have been and it still has a lot of verve and power, with images of troops spilling out of the trains, the Dorados, the ‘golden ones’, Pancho Villa’s cavalry. [Pancho Villa 1878-1923 was the colourful bandit-hero of the Mexican revolution].

This book is allied to Insurgent Mexico by the American journalist John Reed, his journalistic account of the Dorados of the north and the Mexican revolution. I find that people are often surprisingly ignorant about the Mexican revolution, given its importance. Lasting from 1910 to 1920, it gave Mexico its direction for much of the 20th century. It completely changed the country and was the first modern Latin-American revolution, with implications for the way the whole continent changed. Of course, it was anarchic and complicated, with many treacheries and reversals.

With Pancho Villa and his men, Azuela and Reed created an image of Mexican wildness that was to play down the line to countless Westerns and Sergio Leone movies – of amoral brutality and a wayward sentimentality; singing corridas and sharing your last tortilla, while laughing at how the brains of your enemy had splattered the ground.