In the Shadow of the Conquistador

by Shane Joseph

After a silence of twenty years, Jimmy receives an unexpected letter from his old friend and nemesis, George, inviting him on a trek along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Arriving in Lima, Jimmy finds the ailing George as mercurial as ever. They begin their odyssey, catching up on the intervening years, reliving periods when their lives had intersected, and revisiting the events that destroyed their relationship.

Both men are haunted by the enigmatic Denise, the woman they had lured, loved and lost in Canada. Their conquest of Denise parallels the plunder of Peru by conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the topic of a novel that George is writing in an attempt at self-discovery.

On the Inca Trail, George and Jimmy meet trekkers Ali and Bea who exhibit the duality of beauty and introspection. They team up, even share tents. But there are many treacherous turns along the Trail before the travelers arrive in the sacred city where George is forced to confront his personal demons and Jimmy is pushed to reverse the legacy of the conquistadors.

In this novel, Shane Joseph explores the hunger for conquest that drives change, the bonds of friendship that sustain faith, and the power of love that transcends evil.

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Shane Joseph is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, Canada. He began writing as a teenager living in Sri Lanka and has never stopped. Redemption in Paradise, his first novel, was published in 2004 and his first short story collection, Fringe Dwellers, in 2008. His novel, After the Flood, a dystopian epic set in the aftermath of global warming, was released in November 2009, and won the Canadian Christian Writers award for best Futuristic/Fantasy novel in 2010. His story collection, Paradise Revisited, was shortlisted for the ReLit Award. His latest novel, Victoria Unveiled, was released in the fall of 2024. His short stories and articles have appeared in several Canadian anthologies and in literary journals around the world. His blog at www.shanejoseph.com is widely syndicated.

His career stints include: stage and radio actor, pop musician, encyclopaedia salesman, lathe machine operator, airline executive, travel agency manager, vice president of a global financial services company, software services salesperson, publishing editor, project manager and management consultant.

Self-taught, with four degrees under his belt obtained through distance education, Shane is an avid traveller and has visited one country for every year of his life and lived in four of them. He fondly recalls incidents during his travels as real lessons he could never have learned in school: husky riding in Finland with no training, trekking the Inca Trail in Peru through an unending rainstorm, hitch-hiking in Australia without a map, escaping a wild elephant in Zambia, and being stranded without money in Denmark, are some of his memories.

After immigrating (twice), raising a family, building a career, and experiencing life's many highs and lows, Shane has carved out a niche in Cobourg, Ontario with his wife Sarah, where he continues to work, write, and strum his guitar.

Shane Joseph, believes in the gift of second chances. He feels that he has lived many lives in just a single lifetime, always starting from scratch with only the lessons from the past to draw upon. His novels and stories reflect the redemptive power of acceptance and forgiveness.

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Shadow of the Conquistador, Shane Joseph’s 2015 novel about friendship, loyalty, and the soul crushing hunger of conquest is both absorbing and thought provoking, leading the reader along the narrow jungle trails towards a conclusion at Machu Picchu.

Because of it’s setting, themes and style this was somewhat reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry (though this is much better structured and disciplined), Carnal Knowledge, and obliquely, like Joseph Conrad’s 1915 novel Victory.

Two old friends, Jimmy and George, from Canada meet in South America for a research journey into the ancient Inca empire. Narrating from shifting perspectives, Joseph documents the long and complicated history between the two and their shared love of a woman, Denise. Joseph also provides her viewpoint through dynamic letters to her mother.

Interposed excerpts from George’s novel about the villainous, double-dealing Pizarro compliments and highlights the tense, psychological narrative and provides a historic synchronicity that follows the parallels between current and past events. Most interesting, Joseph has written these excerpts through George’s hand and the reader sees more just a historic fiction of Pizarro, but the conqueror through George’s eye, the history written by a man whose own inner demons and avaricious desires equal the Spaniard’s.

Somber and introspective, but never brooding or heavy, this is well-crafted literature.

*** A free copy of this book was provided in exchange for an honest review

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a strangely satisfying novel, with a main focus on the relationship of two men and the woman that they both loved.

The novel does take place mostly in Peru when the two old friends reunite for an adventure. One is a lady's man, moving from one "conquest" to another through his whole life, while the other is a bit more regular. The whole novel spans their entire history, the love triangle between them and their loss.

It mirrors the history of Peru as they go to visit it and their adventure on the trails, and all of the conflicts that rise are beautifully explored and are eventually resolved.

This is a very polished novel, focused on all three characters rather deeply, with a lot of heart and an amazing degree of disappointment, too. I was genuinely moved, but to be honest, I was mostly moved by the conquered, not by the conquistador nor by his buddy. Their drama was at the forefront, of course, but I felt a lot of pity for the woman.

Two ravaging armies, and the innocent caught in-between. *sigh*

Very nice novel, quite entertaining.

Thanks goes to the author for a copy of the book for review!

[Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shane Joseph is a thoughtful and perceptive writer, mostly of serious general fiction. By "serious," I don't mean devoid of humor --this novel, for instance, like real life, has its funny moments-- but rather a seriousness of purpose: he seeks to illuminate the human condition, in ways that will make his readers think and feel more deeply, and maybe grow personally as a result. I'm privileged to be one of his Goodreads friends; and since I'd earlier read and liked his story collection, Paradise Revisited, he generously offered me a free review copy of this novel, with no strings attached. It was an offer I was glad to accept, and I wasn't disappointed in the slightest.

From internal references in the book, we can calculate that our main story here takes place in 2007. Like Homer and Bunyan (and many other great authors of the Western tradition) before him, Shane casts his tale in terms of a journey: an arduous trek on foot into the Andes, to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. But our travelers here, like many literary travelers before them, are on an inner journey as well, that involves looking back over pivotal events of several decades of their lives, from youth to middle age. The author positions his flashbacks with artistry, the past illuminating the present in a perfectly crafted tapestry. That's not to say it's made up of only, or even mainly, nice materials. In her novel Saint Sebastian's Head, LeAnn Neal Reilly speaks of the interplay of darkness and light in certain schools of visual art, in which both have to be combined to create the masterpiece. That speaks symbolically of the interplay of the two in life and realistic literature as well; and it's an interplay that's never been more evident than it is here.

This is an ambitious novel, attempting to cover many themes in a short span, 236 pages (and succeeding admirably despite that constraint --or perhaps because of it; the effect of the honed prose is stronger than a more sprawling novel would be): the power of friendship, for both good and ill; the fleeting shortness of earthly life and the crucial importance of all the choices we make; the question of where you strike the balance between spontaniety and ordered control in your life; the way the sins of the parents, in the form of emotionally distant and/or abusive parenting, are visited on the kids in the baggage that they carry; and above all, the message that life and human relationships aren't about taking for yourself, but about giving to others. A native of Sri Lanka, Shane also is concerned with the negative legacy of colonialism for both conquered and conquerors; but he makes it clear that this macrocosm is a direct extension of the microcosm, how we treat others in our individual lives. (While there's scant reference here to Christianity, this is a message that's very consistent with Christian ethics.)

The characterizations here are wonderfully drawn, a great strength of the novel. None are perfect, and George Walton is far from it: a self-centered, lecherous, foul-mouthed egoist and pothead who's capable of extremes of shabby behavior to get what he wants, and ruins lives in his wake. You spend much of the novel wanting profoundly to give him a hard kick in the buttocks. But you also see him as a hurting human who deserves your compassion, and who's capable of some moments where you'd like to shake his hand. Other characters who are more sympathetic also have their flaws; Shane cares about them all, views them all (or mostly all) with compassion, and invites us to do the same. He evokes the milieu of his adopted Canada with ease, and draws Peru with an assurance that suggests he's actually been there and is describing what he knows. Readers should be warned that there is some R-rated bad language here, including a number of f-word uses (mostly by George); there's also some explicit sexual content, used to convey the ugliness of exploitative sex, not to make it attractive. But none of this is gratuitous.

What we have here is a warts-and-all look at modern life, with no stinting of exposure to its dark side. But unlike the writers of contemporary "literary" fiction, Shane Joseph's vision isn't one of unmitigated darkness. Rather, it's a vision of reality where hope for redemption and renewal has a grounding, and where truth, meaning and virtue aren't illusions. I'm not familiar enough with modern Canadian literature to say whether or not he's one of the more consequential and gifted Canadian authors of serious fiction writing today. But IMO, if literary criticism in a future generation ever recovers its soul and returns to the integrity it once had, he's sure to be in the running for that status.

[Paul Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the Shadow of the Conquistador

By Shane Joseph

When Shane sent me a reader’s copy of his novel, In the Shadow of the Conquistador, he warned me that it was a ‘tad’ dark. It was! On my first read through, I was angry, frustrated but more importantly, I was confused. What was I reading I wondered? Comedy, tragedy or a combination of both? The novel was hard for me to categorize but I found myself put upon, forced to figure out the genre of Conquistador before I could expect to understand its message. Whatever the novel was, it certainly wasn’t a beach read.

I also had to deal with my reader reaction to the book. Why did it irritate me? Was it one of those books that left the reader stymied because they had no identification with its characters? On the other hand, was Joseph’s novel cutting just a little too close, convicting me of my personal flaws and that of my generation? Through the story of Jimmy and George, two narcissistic bastard types whom I found hard to sympathize with, I felt the cold dark shadow of the Conquistador’s legacy fall directly on me. With that realization I decided to see the book as a cautionary tale much like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, warning the reader of the pitfalls and follies of a misdirected journey.

Upon my second reading, I began to discover parallels not only between the characters and their historical exemplars but between the missteps of my generation and the plot of the entire novel. Thematic and historical comparisons abound idealism, braggadocio, narcissism, self-justification, patriarchy, the cult of victimhood, passive aggression, learned dependency, impotence, aggression, and exploitation. These appalling character traits are all there in the novel, gliding between the historical reflection of the 16 Century Conquistadors and their contemporary counterparts Jimmy and George.

“A tad dark,” says Shane. No kidding! Nonetheless, it is the journey of these two cronies that provides the deepest instruction. There is light at the end of the tunnel if the right questions are asked. Crafting the questions is up to the reader. Two questions I kept in mind as I read were: “Can two self-centered bastards be friends?” and “What is the solution to the cultural and personal illness at the centre of the novel?”

In one sense, In The Shadow of the Conquistador is a story of friendship. Or is it? The o’l saw, “With friends like that who needs enemies?” aptly applies. However you define friendship, it is difficult to see George and Jimmy as anything but dysfunctional in their relations. Their undoubtedly deep and emotionally laden connection is grounded in neediness. The two men have many commonalities. They are sons born out of wedlock so to speak; the unkind phrase bastard literally could apply. They both tragically lost their fathers early and were spousified by their mothers, leaving them little to build their relationship to the opposite sex or their masculinity.

Shame flooded their friendship early on. George took the bully hero role demeaning Jimmy in a variety of humiliating ways, perpetually putting his friend down with a jocular arm wrapped around his friend shoulder. The most embarrassing early scenario was that of George tricking Jimmy into a premature sexual encounter with an oversexed librarian. Jimmy acknowledges that he always came in second. Nowhere is this more evident as when both men fall in love with the same woman Denise. Denise was attracted to both but settled for bad-boy George. All the while she admired and respected Jimmy whom she utilized as her best friend, whose unrequited love was rarely and only belatedly reciprocated.

The conquest of Denise was settled by trickery where George played a rigged card game to accompany Denise to a graduation. Denise is depicted as either an object of lust or veneration by both men. Through exploitation, these men denigrated Denise’s talent, femininity, and self-respect. She even lost her child in a physical tussle between the warring Conquistadors in her life.

George and Jimmy’s friendship was centered on a manipulative back and forth tug-of-war for Denise. Friends by definition are supposed to have a third interest beyond their direct relationship, an object of mutual affection, but George and Jimmy’s pursuits damned all. Denise encapsulates it best: “I feel like a ravaged land myself, letting two conquerors, first self-indulgent George, then quiet and controlling Jimmy, have their way with me. Five years later, I am still trying to emerge from their shadow…” Can such a shadow be cast by genuine friends?

Mercifully through their travels to Machu Picchu, the two allies in exploitation become friends of a higher nature. Instead of questing for the gold of acquisition, their arduous journey up the mountain demanded courage, honesty, and self-renunciation. George and Jimmy traversed the mountain together but as their wise indigenous mountain guide suggested, each one climbing did so alone-together. Valdez tells them, “Tomorrow when we walk, I will not talk, except to show you some interesting sights. Otherwise, you will walk alone with your thoughts.”
What kind of mountain could heal the wounds of these men? Was Machu Picchu, Mount Purgatory? The novel didn’t seem to indicate that, as much it represented a place of disclosure, self-revelation, and enlightenment. The historical significance of the Machu Picchu symbolically reveals its enlightening potential. When the Conquistadors came to conquer and capture the Inca, the native peoples were in hiding on the mountain, but upon hearing the tumult of the approaching army they fled. By fleeing, they drew attention to their movements and were defeated. Frantic action and lack of courage were their downfall. Jimmy made the connection:
"I wonder whether the people of Machu Picchu had been like me, people who required order in their lives; and when they sensed that order under threat with the coming of the Spaniards, they had felt to regain their balance. And their evolving culture at Machu Picchu had been permanently paused inside brush stroke, like Denise’s painting, never to grow strong again.… Might was right in this era and the city had died under the passing shadow of the conquistador, much like the rest of the Inca empire."

Here Jimmy appears not to be identifying with the Conquistadors but with the indigenous Inca peoples. There is an irony beneath this surface identification insofar as both Inca and Conquistadors mirror one another in their lack of genuine courage. The Spanish concept of courage involved aggression, moving out, and striking hard with their superior technology, whereas the Incan courage lay in stalwartly staying hidden cradled in Machu Picchu. The Conquistadors were blinded to the physical presence of the Inca just as they were rendered oblivious to the genuine value of the Incan sacred culture by their materialistic avarice. If it were not for the skittishness of the frightened Inca, the Conquistador’s would never have defeated them. It is telling that the Spanish missed the sacred mountain entirely whereas the Inca, fearful and overwhelmed by the Spanish technological superiority, betrayed themselves.

This irony contains a clue to identifying and resolving the illness at the core of the novel. Jimmy, Denise and the Inca are intimidated by power and do not recognize their strengths sufficiently. Conversely George doesn’t accept his impotence, fear, and inferiority; he blinds himself to spiritual value through his aggression and hubris. The cure lies in the transcendence of their perspectives through enlightenment. Not the supernatural enlightenment of a literal location but an inner perception brought about through a disciplined and sustained discipline. Machu Picchu was a symbolic endpoint, a symbol of the journey completed, but it was not the magic of this mountain that healed Jimmy and George. George’s admission of his impotence, dependence and vulnerability drained him of his pride and led him to own up to his selfishness and decadence. George could no longer cling on to his romantic vision or historical revisionism of the Conquistador as a self-justification. Jimmy’s recognized that instead of seeking solace through dependency upon venerated women, he could discover his power though self-extending charity toward a cripple child Tamaya.

George and Jimmy’s realizations came about as they journeyed together and reflected upon their histories honestly. They saw their habitual patterns in their escapades up the mountain. Through competitiveness, through dependence, through jealousy, they came to recognize the power of mutual support and loyalty. Testimony to their progress is expressed by Valdez who admitted, “And señor one more thing… I am sorry to have compared you and Señor George to the conquistadors. You really care about each other more than you care about women.” Valdez might not have had that exactly right insofar as it was not women that the men cared about but their lusts. Nonetheless, Valdez recognized a real bond between two bastards who had made significant movements toward becoming friends. One might say they were recovering Conquistadors.

So it seems that the novel answered my two questions. Yes, bastards can become authentic friends when they develop their character, learn to take responsibility, own their power and use it cooperatively to empower others. Shane Joseph has given us a cautionary tale; a moral template by which to gauge our generation’s legacy. It leaves the reader wondering what kind of shadow do I cast?

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

He felt his life was heading towards its climax and it would happen here in Peru, amidst the ghosts and skeletons of the conquistadors who had blatantly raped and pillaged to achieve their selfish ends, but who had built their empires and left their stamp on the world. It was exhilarating too, this feeling of connectedness with history, to realize that he was not alone, despite the delinquent life he had led.

I was recently in Peru, so one can imagine how intrigued I was by the idea of this novel, In the Shadow of the Conquistador, and its use of a hike up the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu to lay bare and examine a lifelong friendship between two men. On my trip, my husband and I fell in with an American couple, Randy and Karen, and every time our guide would point out the ruins of an Inca temple that the Spaniards had forced the conquered Peruvians to dismantle (in order to use the blocks for the foundations of their own churches and haciendas), Randy would turn to us and say, “I'm really hating this Pizarro and all his bloodthirsty goons”. Eventually, I pointed out to him that while the Spaniards had indeed committed cultural and racial genocide in Peru (today, there is no one left of pure Inca blood), this is exactly what the Inca themselves did as they built and spread their own empire; humans throughout time and place have always done exactly that; neither they in America nor we in Canada would be living where we are if our early colonisers hadn't cleared our continent of its pesky original inhabitants. With In the Shadow of the Conquistador, author Shane Joseph brings this idea into the modern day: as Me Generation-Baby Boomers who lived their lives without consideration of the consequences for those around them, the main characters act out on the small scale the larger history of Pizarro and the Inca; proving that the blood of the conqueror yet flows through all our veins. Of particular interest to me because of its setting, In the Shadow of the Conquistador was an interesting read, full of adventure and food for further thought.

This book focuses on three main characters: George, the son of a Canadian politician, he was raised to covet power, money, and women (aka the Conquistador); Jeremy/Jimmy, grew up with and was dominated by George (aka the conquered); and Denise, the woman they both loved (aka the gold). As the book begins, Jimmy hears from George for the first time in twenty years; an invitation for the pair to meet in Peru and hike together up to Machu Picchu as research for a book George is writing. As they meet and begin their adventure, the narrative uses several alternating devices to tell the whole story: first person from Jimmy's point-of-view; third person from George's (which implies that the entire story is written later by Jimmy); letters written from Denise to her mother over the years; and excerpts from George's book on Pizarro, the historical passages often mirroring what is happening in the modern day. In this way, we learn of the boys' childhood and early adult years together, what each was up to in their years of estrangement, and if there will be a chance for reconciliation as they approach old age.

My dreams were of George dressed as a Spanish conquistador and me as an Inca chief in Spanish clothes, colonizing parts of South America. We had divided the continent between us, taking countries at random. At last, we faced each other in Machu Picchu – there were no more colonies to take, just each other's. The Puma head on top of Saksyawaman had been replaced by a naked Denise – sexy woman, as she was called. We circled each other for the final duel, him spewing vomit at me, and me shitting in his face. I awoke in a rush, a cry in my throat.

I chose the above quote because not only does it nicely capture Jimmy's ambivalent relationship with George, but the details rang true with my own recent experience: every time our guide referred to the site of Saksyawaman, Randy would pipe up with, “Did you say sexy woman? Are we going to see sexy woman?” (Maybe you had to be there, he thought he was hilarious.) And in our group, every day someone new would fall to gut problems – the vomiting and diarrhea was rampant – but happily, Randy's wife Karen is a Gastroenterologist who had brought along powerful antibiotics that cleared everyone up. And it's the details throughout this book that I most appreciated: not just drinking corn beer and coca tea, the popping of Diamox for altitude sickness in Peru, but everywhere from Scarborough and Old Montreal to the Kawarthas and Kananaskis are familiar places to me; each small detail triggered a ping of recognition and the little bits of truth make the whole more believable.

I feel like the ravaged land of the Inca myself, letting two conquerors, first self-indulgent George, then quiet and controlling Jimmy, have their way with me. Five years later, I am still trying to emerge from their shadow, and have now given up trying. I am what I am, or what they have made me.

Now to my complaint: The above quote is from one of Denise's letters to her mother, and not only do I think it makes her position in the story too obvious, but I never found anything she wrote in these letters to be believable. As a matter of fact, I didn't find anything about the Denise character believable (set aside the offensiveness of the men playing a single hand of poker to decide which of them would “win” Denise, what educated and independent young woman would accept the outcome, even if she's told it's the result of a “talk” between the men?) I understand that thematically Denise needs to be fairly agentless in order to play the part of the spoils, but her entire story represents no woman I've known (and this is also true for the two women, Ali and Bea, that the men later meet along the Inca Trail).

I thank Shane Joseph for sending me a copy of In the Shadow of the Conquistador; it really was an interesting and well-crafted read. This should be considered a high three stars.

[Waheed Rabbani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface: This review was previously published in the Book Review Literary Trust of India April 2016 issue
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Our story must have a better ending, than the Inca’s. Or else we wouldn’t have progressed in five hundred years.

In a recent interview [1], US President Barack Obama said, “when I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels.” Shane Joseph’s latest book, In The Shadow of the Conquistador, is indeed one such novel from which we can learn much. While on its surface it might appear to be a love-triangle romantic story, it has a lot to offer in our understanding of the human spirit that at times lusts for conquest and colonization, but can develop bonds of friendship which sometimes can lead to betrayal, and yet through the power to love it can overcome evil.
The novel begins in contemporary Toronto when Jeremy (Jimmy) Spence, a retired university professor, receives an email unexpectedly from his childhood school friend, George Walton, inviting him on a trip to trek up to the famous, Machu Pichu, in Peru. The letter is a surprise for Jimmy, for on account of some personal differences and George having moved to Vancouver, he hadn’t met nor heard from George for nearly twenty years. Although, Jimmy thought that Peru in the November rainy season might not be ideally suited for trudging up the cold mountain, he relents, feeling guilty at not having kept in touch with his life-long friend. His interest is also piqued when George mentions that having given up on academia he is heavily into colonial history and is writing a book about Peru, attempting to discover himself.
Their meeting in Lima, while starting somewhat shakily, is like that of long-lost friends and they soon settle, over food and drinks, into reminiscing their past. Jimmy finds the paunchy and greying George just as fast-talking and—from his suggestion that they procure some local prostitutes—over-sexed as ever. He still possesses his violent nature that again gets him in trouble and ends up getting beaten, and his camera smashed. George finds Jimmy “still bone thin,” and when Jimmy informs him that he has been exercising regularly, George responds, while concealing his own terminal illness, “You plan meticulously, Jimmy. Gotta leave room for the unexpected.” While it seems strange that these two with diverging personalities were close friends, their bond was due to their mutual love for an attractive Montreal woman, Denise Langevin, they pursued. While Jimmy was intensely in love with Denise, it was George who ‘conquered’ and married her. We learn much of their private lives—mostly in Toronto—from their musings during the march. They recount their juvenile pranks, and their memorable and forgettable events that destroyed their relationship between them and those they loved.
The novel’s plot thickens when they meet two other young Canadian women trekkers, Ali and Bea who bears an uncanny representation of Denise, in beauty and compassionate character. They are there not only for sightseeing but also on a native child adoption mission. Quite naturally the two bachelors get together with the women and even end up sharing tents with them. However, as fate would have it, other precarious twists and turns lie ahead on the trail that the travelers have to confront before they can reach the fabled Machu Pichu.
Shane Joseph has skillfully structured the novel in alternating chapters that tell the story of Jimmy’s and Georges’ lives in Canada and their travel in Peru. While some may consider the constant flashbacking of scenes tedious, these in fact tend to keep the reader’s interest alive. The twin story lines come together at the end thereby making the conclusion most satisfying, and reveal the true nature of the characters’ personalities, and highlights their changes.
Shane Joseph has also maintained the theme of colonialism and its impact on the native population throughout this novel. This is achieved in a unique way by introducing a historical novel within a modern romantic love-triangle story. Snippets of George’s book on the conquest of the Inca’s by the Spaniards—narrating the account of Conquistadors Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro—are deftly interspersed throughout the novel. From their story, readers can draw a parallel between the old and our present day lives, not unlike conquistadors’, and how we develop when we are young, and have to live with the consequences in our old age. It is then easy to recognize the impact of Jimmy’s and George’s pursuit and conquest over Denise and other women, betrayals of their friendship, and finally the resulting impact on their lives and reconciliatory changes which they attempt.
While this novel is based partially in modern day Peru and its colonial past, the similarity to the harsh experiences of the native population from conquest and subservience in other countries is very relevant. There is much to be learned while planning for the future from such novels. Furthermore, in the words of President Obama, they offer an important set of understanding to our role as citizens.
This novel will be enjoyed by all seeking to comprehend the human spirit. Highly recommended.

[1]Reference: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015...

[Sharon Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shane Joseph’s latest novel, In the Shadow of the Conquistador. deals with people’s expectations when they are young, what they do to attain them, and coming to grips in middle age with the results.

Joseph’s two main characters, long-time friends George Walton and Jeremy “Jimmy” Spence meet as school children living in Toronto’s east end. George is aggressive and Jimmy is withdrawn. However, the two become close friends, with Jimmy, like the novel’s title, living in George’s shadow. A third character, Denise Langevin, whom both men love but only one marries, keep the two men connected, sometimes in mind only, with several separations, sometimes due to job locations, sometimes due to their personal conflict. There is also a fourth “character” – the novel Conquistador, written over the years by George, which is inserted as a parallel to the main story. Conquistador is Spanish for conqueror and lady-killer, both of which apply to George’s modus operandi going through life. George’s novel tells the story of the Spanish conquering the Incas in Peru in the 1500s, particularly the Spanish leader, Francisco, who like George, is compelled to conquer – in his case – the Incas.

Joseph's novel begins with the two men, now middle-aged, meeting in Lima. Peru, at George’s request, after a 20-year separation. Ostensibly they are there to climb the Andes Mountain to the Machu Picchu, an historic site from the Incan reign before the Spanish conquest. As they hike the treacherous route with their guide Valdez, Jimmy’s and George’s past parades before them, taunting and terrorizing them. In Lima they meet two women, Ali and Bea, 15 years their junior. Ali is a spitting image of Denise and shy Bea has a large facial scar. The inevitable seems to be building up, but just when you are expecting it, Joseph adds a few twists.

Joseph intertwines this past with the present, each driving the novel forward. The reader learns that George is a womanizer, to extremes, and that trait cost him a possible political career, his career in academia and his wife, Denise. Denise turns to Jimmy, but he is a control freak and as neither man let her “do her own thing” she leaves them both and returns to her native Montreal where her mother is dying.

The difficult climb up the mountain, done in spurts over several days acts as a catalyst for George and Jimmy to sort out the consequences of their lives. As they interact with each other and the two women, both learn that you can’t always get what you want in life, but the alternative can be a better road to take, or if you live too hard and selfish, sometimes it is too late to do anything but accept the consequences.

Joseph continues to write a compelling story with real-life characters that readers can relate to. Only one negative – I wish the actual years for the past would have been headlined at the beginning of each pertinent section as I got confused a few times, especially when Denise and Jimmy meet after seven years of not seeing each other and Denise has aged, but the timeline is not as far along as I thought. The only dates are the ones at the top of Denise’s letters to her mother and the odd reference by Jimmy to starting university in 1968. And I never did figure out exactly where in middle age George and Jimmy are when they meet in Peru.

But dates aside, I suggest reading In the Shadow of the Conquistador in one or two sittings to get the most out of it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shane Joseph’s most recent novel “In the Shadow of the Conquistador” is his boldest work to date. It is unflinching in its portrayal of the self-centered George, who is driven by both his insatiable sexual desires and his lust for power, and his best friend Jimmy who is everything George is not.

The lifelong, on-again off-again friendship of George and Jimmy is traced across Canada, across the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu where they reunite for an odyssey of self-discovery, and through the eyes of the enigmatic Denise whom they both love in their distinctly flawed ways.

“In the Shadow of the Conquistador” explores the tortuous path love can, and the price that sometimes comes with it, as well as how friendship can be based as much on differences as on similarities. It pulls no punches in exploring the personal demons of its characters – a compelling read

[Shauna Clinning]

Shane Joseph has woven an intricate tale of how men and women destroy each other, tying together the past, the recent past, and the present. His novel is told from three points of view, with a fourth interlaid through a story within a story, an ambitious undertaking for anyone. Jimmy and George are haunted by their pasts, as well as the memory of Denise, a woman they have both loved and, in their own ways, used or abused. George and Jimmy make a trip to Peru, where their pasts collide with the now. The author gives us wonderful descriptions of the people and land, especially as his characters near Machu Piccu. I, for one, would have loved to stay longer in Peru with these characters to learn more of the land and its people.

Shane has also done a good job of capturing the sexual and political cultures of the last century in Canada (particularly in Toronto), making his story relevant for today from a #metoo perspective. The characters of George and Jimmy are well-defined, especially their obsession with sex and outdoing each other. I felt quite sorry for Denise and wanted her to either find more inner strength or to lash out at these men, for causing her such suffering over decades. The reader will find parallels between these three characters and the tensions wrought upon the Inca by the Spanish when they conquered Peru.

Overall, I found this to be an enjoyable read that gives the reader pause to think about how we treat each other.