Four cadets form some kind of club in the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Peru.  In the beginning they just play dirty tricks on the other cadets, mostly on cadets from junior years, or find ways to go around the restrictions the military regime of the school imposes onto them.  But it goes always a step further, and one day "the Jaguar" sends Cava out to steal the questions for an upcoming chemistry exam, questions that will be sold to their fellow cadets.  In his nervosity Cava breaks a window, but he's sure nobody can trace the burglary to him.

Cadet Arana, AKA "The slave", the dupe of many of the others' pranks, is desperate.  Everyone is punished for as long as it takes to find the thieves, and he longs for a girl from his neighborhood he's in love with, and the punishment is suspension of all leave.  So the Slave goes to lieutenant Huarina and turns Cava in, in exchange for the permission to go and visit his girl.

Not much later during an excercise Arana is shot in the head.  He doesn't survive it.  For the army it's simple: the boy must have held his gun incorrectly, stumbled, and shot himself.  Cadet Alberto Fernández, nicknamed "the Poet", accuses the Jaguar of the murder, and in one attempt to clean his conscience he tells about the ongoing bullying, smuggling of alcohol and cigarettes, the gambling, and al the other dirty little games of the cadets.  The army however is not willing to let a simple cadet smudge its reputation..

The story in itself is quickly told, the outline at least, but what I haven't mentioned yet is that half of the book is flashbacks of some of the protagonists.  Of the today we only know of what happens in the Military Academy or on the rare moments they can spend outside with their friends or relatives.  Through their past we learn more about the backgrounds of some, some of them into criminality, others had a deep friendship with a girl they knew for a long time, there were difficulties with money or with parents - nothing exceptional really, but the fragments build a surprisingly complete image of the boys.

A constant, both in the now and in the past, is the collision between the individual and the collective, whether that collective is a group or an institute like the army or the school.  A struggle for power, a struggle for individuality, a struggle to be in the group, a struggle to protect the group, a struggle to protect the institution from the group. 

Mario Vargas Llosa paints a grim and grimy picture of adolescents in a group, and an equally ugly picture of the officers closing ranks and doing whatever it takes to protect themselves and the army as a whole, even if that means smirching a dead cadet and making it even harder for his relatives to cope with their feelings about his final hours.  And still, what makes this entire book so immensly powerful are the last few pages, the hopeful ending after the ending.

This is, due to the moving from first to third person, and the moving back and forth in time, jumping from cadet to cadet, not a book to reading without dedicating your attention to it.  But when you do dedicate yourself to it, the reward is strong and wonderful.