Don Quixote's Delusions: travels in Castilian Spain
Miranda France Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 243pp, £20
ISBN 0297842773
This is an entirely admirable book, and one can't say fairer than that. Its subtitle suggests that it is a travel book, but it extends far beyond that exhausted genre. It is reportage, history, memoir and literary criticism, all jumbled up and subtly gelled in a prose style and by a manner of thought that is unique to Miranda France. It is her second book, and she writes with such manifest enjoyment that we can expect many more.
The reportage first. Miranda France has apparently been living in or visiting Spain for a couple of decades, originally as a student in Madrid, and she gives us some frank close-up impressions of how the country's values have changed since the death of General Franco. It is a startling scene that she surveys from her lodging-house windows, as she and her friend Carmen lean over the balcony watching the world go by: transvestites figure largely in it, together with prostitutes, drug dealers, heroin addicts injecting themselves in doorways, fetish shops, South American revolutionaries (one of whom she falls in love with) and an infinite variety of rogues.
Miranda France reminds us how astonishingly repressive was the Generalissimo's regime even in everyday matters, with its crude censorship, its gloomy religiosity and its immovable sexual prejudices. In his day, chorus girls were allowed to show their legs only in towns with populations of more than 40,000; and Carmen's mother, not to mention leaning over that balcony and swapping badinage with the prostitutes below, would probably have needed her husband's permission to be there in the first place. As to the vertiginous sex advertisements of fin-de-siecle Madrid, offering all manner of cheerful indulgence, Franco would have had editors and proprietors up before an inquisition almost as severe as Torquemada's.
And yet, it seems, behind and amid all this tumultuous global decadence, an older Spanishness survives. The Aids rate may be high, the birth rate the lowest in Europe, church attendance minimal, but still the Spanish family stands strong, the pomaded paseo parades as twilight falls, conversations are bawled across tapas bars, multitudinous fiestas are celebrated and nuns are darkly cloistered (even if many of them have to be imported from South America to keep their numbers up). Spain may now be part of Europe, but in many respects it is still most decidedly Spain.
This conjunction of opposites is the real theme of Miranda France's book. More than most countries, Spain has been governed by light and shade, hot and cold; it is both earthy and aloof, and the noblest expression of these dichotomies is, well, Don Quixote. We must suppose he was crazy, but he was also one of the grandest characters in all literature. He was simple but immensely complex; laughable but tragic, too; imaginary though he is, Spaniards themselves recognise him as their true exemplar.
Quixote has ethereally dominated many a book about Spain - like a hologram, as France says of his delusionary Lady Dulcinea - and he stands at the heart of this one, too. He provides a paradigm enabling France to explore the country more profoundly - and also, perhaps, to explore something of herself, because the Knight of the Mournful Countenance is a kind of father figure of psycho-analysis. This is where literary criticism enters Don Quixote's Delusions, because skilfully dispersed through its pages is a thoughtful and scholarly discussion of Cervantes's masterpiece and its influence down the centuries.
Nothing can be more dampening than literary criticism, and Miranda France's excursions into it might well have dulled the exuberance of her own work. Her agile technique, however, carries her through. She skips from bookish assessment to political analysis, hops from travel descriptions to confessions of emotional entanglement with Peruvian subversives, suddenly swoops into slang or swerves laughing into humour.
Another of the opposites of Spain concerns the grave and the hilarious, epitomised by the dear old Don himself. Miranda France, though she is never dismissive about the grandeur of Spain, wonderfully evokes its comedy. It is only proper that her book, so generous a study of contemporary Spanishness, should end with what seems to me one of the funniest passages in all the literature of the place.
At one of Castile's many rural festivals, a folkloric figure called El Colacho, dressed like a jester and supposed to be the devil fleeing from the Eucharist, performs a series of jumps over an assemblage of babies, lined up on mattresses and scattered with rose petals. This is meant to protect them from getting a hernia. Miranda France's own baby is among them, not at all used to seeing devilish jesters in red and yellow, trailing horses' tails, flying over his cot. As she awaits the leap, she observes her son's yellow leggings "paddling the air" among the recumbent infants, and characteristically hopes - hopes more than anything, she says - that El Colacho will not land on him.
Jan Morris's new book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, will be published by Faber and Faber in October
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