"Evita the woman with the whip" by Mary Main

This is the biography of Evita that got Tim Rice excited enough to insist that Andrew L-W wrote the musical.

It has some beautiful description: a pueblo "lies like a worm cast on the platter of the plains" and "encompassing as a cup turned down upon a plate and dwarfing the pueblo and man himself to insect size, is the great dome of the sky."

But you could hardly call it unbiassed. It wears its anti-peronista prejudice like a tee-shirt proudly advertising Tommy Hilfiger or Abercrombie & Fitch. Evita cannot do anything without being sneered at. About her only positive quality seems to be her drive and energy and even that is regarded as a rather manic outpouring of unbridled ambition. Thus: Eva is a bad actress who hasn't even worked out what an actress needs to make her good, she is a promiscuous slattern who manipulates men, she is vengeful against political enemies and old friends alike, she resents being sneered at by the oligarchs, she is totally corrupt and on the make and her charitable activities are total shams.

All this might be true. But she must have had something to get her to the top and to keep her there for so long. And she was adored. And Peron clearly adored her too and was prepared to share his Presidency with her when many men would have got rid of the awkward wife.

Aside from this continual negativity (and it sometimes sounds bitchy and snide) the book is mostly a good read. I got a bit bogged down in the details of Peron's first term as President and there was not nearly enough about Evita's final year when the cancer was killing her; the epilogue about Peron's return from 15 years of exile to Argentina was also too rushed.

There is no doubt that the Peronistas did an awful lot of good in Argentina whilst at the same time being a neo-fascist and totalitarian regime that out-mussolinid Mussolini. Main lists their successes such as the minimum wage and decent working conditions and the right for women to vote. Nevertheless they left the country beset by rampant inflation, economically crippled and veering from military junta to weak civilian government. That is why they wanted Peron back when he was basically too old and tired to do any good (he died within a year and was succeeded by his wife who therefore became the first Argentine woman President but who was NOT Evita).

Good book

March 2009 285 pages