'In somewhat of a pickle'

Look, I'll tell you how things re­ally are,” says one of the au­thor's char­ac­ters (speak­ing in 1936,) “what­ever they say, this is not a poor coun­try. This is a coun­try of poor peo­ple.”

And it is the el­e­ments of so­cial class, poverty and in­her­ited wealth that I most en­joyed in this book, and not just those about Spain. The Eng­lish­man of the title is An­thony White­lands, a mid­dle-class, Cam­bridge-ed­u­cated art spe­cial­ist who meets a seem­ingly gen­er­ous and af­fa­ble po­lice of­fi­cer on a train to the cap­i­tal. Be­fore long though, we learn that he is being closely watched. White­lands has ar­rived in an at­mos­phere of pub­lic demon­stra­tions, protest marches, strikes, beat­ings and some­times fatal street vi­o­lence be­tween the forces of the right and the left. The vic­tims are largely the young and po­lit­i­cally un­de­vel­oped but White­lands is at first ig­no­rant of all the fric­tion and ten­sion that has been grip­ping so much of the coun­try.

In­creas­ingly, the pro­tag­o­nist is caught up in a num­ber of sit­u­a­tions out­side his con­trol and he is also snared by his own ap­petites: both car­nal and his de­sire for greater recog­ni­tion and for­tune in “the nar­row world of acad­e­mia, with its te­dious re­search and sor­did ri­val­ries.” He sees him­self as just a small fish but is con­vinced that a newly dis­cov­ered (pri­vately-owned) Ve­lazquez paint­ing could be ex­actly what he his hop­ing for. White­lands goes on to find him­self “in some­what of a pickle,” as his com­pa­tri­ots might say, every­one in the big, small town of Madrid want­ing a piece of him for their own par­tic­u­lar rea­sons. White­lands ap­pears in many senses to be an “Eng­lish gen­tle­men” but he eats like some­one else. I find it hard to ac­cept that he would sit down to a break­fast of “squid and beer.”

Amongst other things, what re­ally comes through in the pages of this jaunty, lively tale is Men­doza's sen­si­tive and in­tu­itive read­ing of art. This book reads like a longish short story though it has a pace that is clearly Mediter­ranean. After ninety pages very lit­tle has hap­pened. It's a kind of slow burner with the char­ac­ters reg­u­larly spout­ing ex­tended “speechi­fy­ing” mono­logues or di­gress­ing into un­con­nected anec­dotes. The reader gets a good feel for their per­son­al­i­ties, fa­cial ex­pres­sions and other man­ner­isms and this all gives the nar­ra­tive the feel of some­thing writ­ten al­most in the pe­riod in which it is said. That's not some­thing eas­ily achieved by a writer sit­ting at a com­puter in the 21st cen­tury.

The au­thor is also as­tute enough to point out the ex­is­tence of ma­sons in Azaña's gov­ern­ment of the time and, with an eye for de­tail, draws what he must think is a dis­tinc­tion be­tween the British upper class with their ap­par­ent love of cer­e­mony and the Span­ish upper class who opt for sim­pler, less for­mal so­cial sit­u­a­tions and meals. Ones of his more ob­ser­vant char­ac­ters knows the ne­ces­sity of ex­plain­ing to the Eng­lish­man that “it's not just money that the pro­le­tariat wants. They want jus­tice and re­spect.” In fact Men­doza drops com­ments on the hes­i­tancy, con­tra­dic­tory de­ci­sion-mak­ing and gen­eral mal­func­tion­ing of pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion that surely also apply to many com­pa­nies and to the ex­cesses of today. “The Spaniards keep wages low,” says a Eng­lish diplo­mat “while at the same time mak­ing so­cial hi­er­ar­chies plain. Work­ers earn half what they should and have to thank their em­ploy­ers... that way, their so­cial po­si­tion is re­in­forced.” On the other hand, one of the Span­ish toffs makes the ab­surd state­ment that Eng­land has an “egal­i­tar­ian so­ci­ety based on so­cial re­la­tions that sat­isfy every­one,” as if the trade union mem­bers and so­cial­ists in Britain did not exist.

Ul­ti­mately, the au­thor en­ter­tains and oc­ca­sion­ally in­forms while giv­ing a rel­a­tively favourable por­trait of the Span­ish “no­bil­ity” of the day. He pro­vides an ex­pla­na­tion for their in­ac­tion on so­cial progress that lies some­where be­tween a rea­son and a weak ex­cuse.