The Dark Bride by Laura Restrepo, (trans. Stephen A Lytle)

A feminist rumble in Colombia's jungle

A rose by any other name, perhaps: only not in the setting of a Colombian novel set in the steamy jungle, where tropical lilies and orchids grow among coffee and coca bushes. Names count for a great deal in this well-researched fictional biography with a feminist twist. It is the politics, as well as the context and writing, that makes it a compulsive read on the age-old theme of woman as virgin, whore and wife.

Heroine Sayonara works her way through all of these, never unhappier than in the first and last roles. Hers is the acquired Japanese name of a young prostitute working at the Dancing Miramar club on the edge of the Colombian rainforest, dressed in a Chinese slit skirt and red bolero. In playing the part of a young innocent and a dutiful wife, she retains her given name of Amanda ("deserving of love").

The book's epic resides in the struggle for the soul of Amanda/Sayonara, a woman who is a whore by vocation – happiest among the "shameless adulterers, hussies, busconas, loose women". The young Indian girl, determined to lose her virginity in the brothel, is brought there by the appropriately named Sacramento, equally determined to be her saviour. Adopted by the brothel's madrina, she is destined for her chosen profession by dint both of being a motherless child, and of having an aunt called Calzones ("Knickers").

It is Sacramento who finally marries her, "dressed as a puta – in her Chinese outfit – underneath and in white on the outside". For him she has to play the part of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but through him she learns that sex can be not only boring but also "filthy". She has no choice but to return to her real roots – and her real, if unrequited, love for the married El Payanes, the handsome petrolero working for the strike-ridden oil company.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sayonara's biography is handled with a remarkable lack of prurience. It is the mutual support and regular frictions of an enclosed society of women that dominate the account of life in a provincial brothel. And the jungle interludes, both as site of unexplored lushness and of economic exploitation, are profoundly evocative. Above all, this book is an exploration of the madness of a country that has known little but violence for the past half-century, and is still being torn apart by the depredations of paramilitaries and guerrillas. As murderous and corrupt as each other, they hold the political process to ransom while politicians in turn hold the people to ransom by failing to establish civilian government.

Laura Restrepo sees herself as the other side of a coin to Isabel Allende, who provides an ecstatic blurb. Allende is steeped in magical realism, whereas Restrepo shows Colombia as it is. Like Allende, she is a journalist; at times, she has gone beyond professional objectivity to become involved in the peace process, and has remained in her home country despite the dangers. For readers who want to know more about that country, mapped through the raw life of a picaresque protagonist, this novel evokes both the horror of the former and the persistence of the latter.