This is the kind of novel that mocks the give-it-10-pages, I-need-to-be-grabbed-because-life-is-too-short school of reading. Even those of the trust-the-artist, persevere-and-stand-fast persuasion should prepare to be tested. I confess: I was confused, bewildered, lost. I wrote down the names of the characters. I backtracked. I cross-tracked. I re-tracked. The shape of the narrative only really began to declare itself around page 90. But then … oh, what an engaging education Harsh Times turned out to be, and how I came to look forward to my time in its company.

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other, an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, was known inside the country as the Octopus, because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, and it controlled the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. U.S. State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department, in New York, was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the U.S., to say nothing of the countries under American sway.

By 1952, the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was fighting a battle he couldn’t win. He was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades—it had also secured a guarantee that it would never have to pay its employees more than fifty cents a day. To address the country’s rampant inequalities, including its feudal labor system, Árbenz passed an agrarian reform law to convert unused private land into smaller plots for peasants. A moderate institutionalist, he argued that the law reflected his capitalist bona fides. Weren’t monopolies considered anathema in the U.S., too?

In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the U.S. government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It was the start of the Cold War, which made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953. Over the following year, the C.I.A. and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. (“He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time.) His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June, 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the U.S. Ambassador, he was rewarded with the Presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane.

The 1954 C.I.A. coup and its aftermath are the subject of “Harsh Times” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, which has been translated by Adrian Nathan West.