Murder and Spanish dirty tricks

So­cial Cri­tique

A Body in Barcelona is one of a se­ries fea­tur­ing Max Cámara, a Va­len­cia-based po­lice in­spec­tor. Cámara is one of many ’out­sider’ cops in mod­ern crime fic­tion, such as Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole, Ian Rankin’s John Rebus or Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde. These he­roes are po­lice­men, yet have no in­ter­est in the tra­di­tional po­lice role of de­fend­ing the sta­tus quo. Con­sid­er­ing gov­ern­ment as cor­rupt, they have their own agenda of jus­tice.

The alien­ated cop Cámara, an an­ar­chist who smokes mar­i­juana, sur­vives in his job be­cause he is ex­pert at catch­ing mur­der­ers. Much of the fas­ci­na­tion of the se­ries lies in Cámara’s an­guish and con­stant crises. His par­ents died when he was young, his sis­ter was mur­dered and, by the time A Body in Barcelona opens, his beloved grand­fa­ther Hi­lario has been re­cently buried and his girl­friend Ali­cia wants “time apart”. Home­less, Cámara bears as heavy a bur­den of de­spair as sev­eral of the fa­mous Scan­di­na­vian de­tec­tives. Yet Web­ster’s nov­els are not dark, brood­ing books, like Hen­ning Mankell’s, but over­flow with the light of Va­len­cia. Like Vázquez Mon­talbán’s Car­valho, Cámara knows how to enjoy the Mediter­ranean shore’s sen­su­ous plea­sures, such as sex, warm nights, wine and long paella lunches.

One of the plea­sures of crime nov­els is voyeuris­tic tourism: we can slouch com­fort­ably in an arm­chair while, for ex­am­ple, Donna Leon guides us along Venice’s canals. Here Jason Web­ster leads us with rel­ish and pre­ci­sion through Va­len­cia. Like many mod­ern crime nov­els, though un­like guide­books, Web­ster’s fic­tion is crit­i­cal: the only in­tel­li­gent ap­proach to a city one loves.

His nov­els dis­sect Va­len­cia. He looks at PP cor­rup­tion, abor­tion, gay mar­riage, food, the (so far failed) at­tempt to de­stroy the Ca­banyal quar­ter, the shrink­ing Horta and Al­bufera, the Falles, bull-fight­ing and the beach. They exalt the in­tri­cate streets of the flat, low, con­fus­ing old city, where the North Sta­tion, L’Estació del Nord, is on the South side and the wind­ing river has no water.

The Crum­bling Coun­try

A Body in Barcelona takes place mainly in Va­len­cia, but a good third of the book is set in Barcelona. Web­ster’s, and Cámara’s, eye is scep­ti­cal: “...what had once, very briefly in 1936, been a rev­o­lu­tion­ary an­ar­chist city now man­aged to be both grubby and af­fected at the same time, and suf­fo­cated by tourists.”

This is Web­ster’s most ex­plic­itly po­lit­i­cal novel yet; and, as if to match the high stakes, Cámara is at his low­est ebb. Mur­der is placed in a con­text not of ran­dom low-lifes, but of po­lit­i­cal strat­egy or­ches­trated from the state. The book moves from Ceuta, Spain’s out­post in Africa and home to a sin­is­ter Colonel Ter­reros who reveres the pa­tri­otic, war­rior past of the Span­ish For­eign Le­gion, to Barcelona, where – the very an­tithe­sis of Ter­reros – Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence sup­port­ers are try­ing to break from a Spain in cri­sis. Car­los, a cyn­i­cal Span­ish spy, ex­plains why a threat­ened state is pre­pared to kill: “This world, our world, Max, is chang­ing. Look around – every in­sti­tu­tion that this coun­try is built on is crum­bling: the monar­chy, the main­stream po­lit­i­cal par­ties, the ju­di­cial sys­tem, the Church… Peo­ple are angry. The cri­sis has ex­posed the rot­ten­ness of the whole struc­ture and it’s in dan­ger of falling down.”

Max does not think the crum­bling coun­try is worth killing for. For him, mur­der, not Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence, is the “tear in the fab­ric” of so­ci­ety.

Web­ster’s novel is an am­bi­tious and com­plex jig­saw, with sev­eral points of view. It in­cludes an an­ar­chist col­lec­tive in­fil­trated by state spies; a Span­ish spy­mas­ter ma­nip­u­lat­ing the sit­u­a­tion; a Va­len­cian su­per­mar­ket mag­nate fi­nanc­ing right-wing ter­ror­ism.

His style is not flashy, nor over-writ­ten, but eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble. Sev­eral ar­rest­ing de­scrip­tions of place are a strength. Any weak­nesses in the book lie in a some­what me­chan­i­cal plot and not al­ways be­liev­able char­ac­ters (the an­ar­chist fa­ther and son). The pol­i­tics, though, no­to­ri­ously hard to write con­vinc­ingly into a novel, are well in­te­grated, a full part of the story-line and of Cámara’s char­ac­ter.

The plot might have seemed far-fetched when the novel came out three years ago, though now it seems acute in its fore­sight. If you like a com­plex, fast-mov­ing thriller, with a wounded, in­tel­li­gent cen­tral char­ac­ter and acute so­cial cri­tique, A Body in Barcelona is for you.