Robert's Alibi by Declan Burke-Kennedy

Despite some pretty fundamental flaws in his story-telling technique Burke-Kennedy's 1988 novel has drawn me back to it a number of times.
Geoffry, the central character and sometimes first-person narrator, is an Irish novelist living in a mountain cabin in the Basque Country.
Although on the French Pyrenees his cabin is close to the Spanish border and the separatist conflict, which was much more virulent when the novel was published, occasionally impinges.
Indeed the historical identity of the Basque people – described by Burke-Kennedy as the equivalent of Europe’s native Americans who were subsequently displaced and marginalised by later waves of invaders – is one of the many layered themes of this novel.
Linguistic similarities between obscure Tibetan dialects and Euskara (the Basque’s indigenous language) are posited, although evidence is never presented.
Slightly more convincing is the similarity between the four pronged Basque Lauburu found on ancient tombs and the Tibetan swastika (an ancient Hindu and Buddhist symbol that existed long before it was hijacked by the Nazis – see below).
Geoffry’s solitude in his mountain retreat is interrupted by the arrival of an Irish woman, whose name we never learn, and her son Julian.
Although he has no idea who she is, Geoffry soon becomes aware that she is very familiar with him and believes that he was her late husband Robert's best friend who used to come and spend his holidays with Geoffry.
Geoffry plays along, initially hoping to learn more information and recall if he had ever actually met Robert, but he is also attracted by her physically and by her obvious vulnerability, and is reluctant to disillusion her in case she leaves.
He learns that Robert is missing and presumed dead following an avalanche while climbing in the Himalayas and that his widow wants Geoffry to edit the manuscript of a book he was writing about the region, its religions, links to the Basque Country and even European Druidism.
As Geoffry becomes further implicated in Robert's deception he and the widow work on the manuscript which initially fascinates him then repulses him. Parts of Geoffry's own past start to click into place – an affair with a Basque photographer called Noelle who took part in photographic expeditions to the Himalayas and who often disappeared out of Geoffry's life with no explanation.
While Geoffry has become complicit in providing an alibi to Robert’s deceptions against his wife, he gradually comes to the conclusion that he has also been deceived.
He in turn embarks on a deception, luring Noelle back to his bed by making her believe that Robert is still alive and that Geoffry is the only person who knows where he is hidding out.
The fairly soap-operish storyline and the author’s frequent insistence on ‘telling’ us that Geoffry is an enigmatic solipsists to whom women are constantly shooting “interested glances” and preening themselves to make him notice them, do grate slightly.
We also get an extended rehearsal of Geoffry's Nietzschean ideas, which just smacks too much of the author trying to tell us what he believes.
This is more a novel of ideas – perhaps Burke-Kennedy wanted to write the book that his fictional character Robert did. A quick google did reveal some speculation on ethnic links between ancient Tibetans and Basques.
There is a good novel in here trying desperately trying to get out but that is burdened down with simply trying too hard to make its central character Geoffry appear more interesting.

A Basque Lauburu

A Tibetan swastika

En el camino/Sur la route

Figueres, north of Barcelona, is where Salvador Dali chose to leave his last statement to the world. As well as his grave it includes many of his best-known works and some which should probably have been buried with him.
The Dali museum suffers from too many people milling around, not really knowning what they are supposed to be looking at or how to react. It is a combination of tacky kitsch and some genuinely fine art.
From Figueres it was a 150 km drive across the border and into France to Carcasone, a medieval walled city which seems to be thriving on the Da Vinci Code-inspired pseudo history surrounding the Knights Templar.
It is an easy place to be in and the streets below the cathedral were home to a chilled out little hotel with a tranquil garden, some nice wine and decent food.
The walled city itself can get a bit crowded but there are plenty of nooks and corners to explore away from the throng.
From there it was a cross-country track past Toulouse, with a quick diversion to have a look around Lourdes, and into Bayonne.
This small city in the French Basque Country is easy to find your way about in. It was a slightly edgy place, maybe because our hotel was beside the train station, with people lurking in doorways and surreptitiously passing envelopes to one another, which gave it a backstreet feel.
The Bonnat Art Museum was a highlight with a selection of Rubens, Le Gréco and Goyas hanging on its walls. There were also some decent and not-too expensive restaurants.
However, Monday’s are not a good day to visit Bayonne as many public buildings seem to close.
The next day we were back on the road and travelled to the Basque capital Bilbao which is normally one of my favourite cities to visit but which was pounded by torrential rain for the two days that we were there.
Even a visit to the normally excellent Guggenheim was a disappointment - collections by Robert Rauschenberg and Henri Rousseau were nor particularly inspiring, although the work of British artist Anish Kapoor was worth seeing.
Probably the fact that we got soaked walking the short distance from our hotel to the museum and squelched our way through the galleries didn’t help my critical appraisal.
That afternoon the rain got heavier and the hotel reception told me to move out hire car from the underground carpark because it was flooding and I spent an hour and half driving around Bilbao’s rain-sodden streets searching for a new parking place.
Things dried up by the time we set off to Cantabria and the absurdly picturesque village of Santillana Del Mar, pictured above.
With parts of its church dating to the 12th century, cobbled street and musky guesthouses with wooden balconies this is a place to chill out.
A medieval market was taking place compete with comely wenches dressed in flowing robes, smoking a fags and chatting on their mobiles.
Craft and food stalls preched precariously on the village’s cobble streets, while falcons and eagles swooped from rooftops onto a falconers arm.
A drive in to the Pico’s de Europa which straddles Cantabria and neighbouring Asturias was a highlight, as was a dish of razor clams, one of my favourite dishes and one which I seem to spend far to much time trying to find.
However, ultimately it was a sausage which was my downfall, bought from a street stall in Santillana, it nestled for 12 hours in my stomach before pouncing and making its presence known.
It didn’t help matters that I was stricken by the dodgy chorizo on the day when we had to undertake our longest drive - 400kms from Santillana, back through the Basque Country, south in Navarra, passing through the Rioja wine region, and into the dusty desert planes of Aragon.
It was my second visit to Zaragoza where I’d arranged to meet a friend and her partner and after a day of not eating was relishing the thought of food and some convivial company.
However, as soon as we walked into a tapas bar and the smell of food hit my nostrils I felt my stomach churning and the after taste of the deadly chorizo gurgled up in the back of my throat.
Course after course of tapas, raciones and pinchos came to our table into which Sinead and our Spanish friends Raquel and Raul contentedly tucked in while I was forced to nibble on dry bread and drink water and try not to throw up over everything.
Next day the stomach was slightly better and I had some breakfast and enjoyed the sights of Zaragoza and returned to same bar that evening to enjoy some of the food I had missed out out on.
Next day it was back to Barcelona for the last few days of our holiday where we tended to linger in the quieter back streets away from the throbbing mass of humanity meandering up and down Las Ramblas.

The Lone Man by Bernardo Atxaga

Maybe it is because this novel is a translation of a translation that its prose often seems clunky and occasionally banal. It was originally written in Basque, tranaslated into Spanish and it is the Spanish translation that has in turn been translated into English.
Atxaga's narrative technique is also slightly unusual, much of it takes the form of an internal dialogue in Carlos the main protatagnist's head between himself, a nagging voice of self-doubt who he has named The Rat, his former Eta commander Sabino, and his estranged brother Kropotsly (who is in a mental institution).
It is a claustraphobic novel set mostly in and around a hotel outside Barcelona which is owned by Carlos and a number of other former Eta activists. The hotel is almost symbolic of Carlos's psyche and seems to have trapped him both physically in the same way that his past has trapped him psychologically.
It was bought from the proceeds of an armed bank raid after Carlos and the others were released from prison. They have all more or less cut themselves off from their militant past and are even critical of the direction in which Eta has gone.
However, despite this Carlos has hidden two on-the-run Eta members who police throughout Spain are searching for. Wanted posters for them are everywhere. Things are complicated because the Polish national soccer team are staying in the hotel during the 1982 World Cup and the grounds are swamped with police.
Carlos soon realises that there is more to the police presence than merely protecting the footballers and he suspects that someone has tipped them off that the fugitives are hidding somewhere in the hotel or within its grounds.
His colleagues suspect that something is going on and Carlos is forced into betraying life-long friendships and loyalties as he tries to pretend everything is normal, knowing that if the fugitives are captured his betrayal will land his friends in as much trouble with the authorities as himself.
His attempts to remain calm and act as if everything is normal while under the scrutiny of his friends and police (uniformed and undercover) the blaze of publicity surrounding the Polish squad staying in the hotel and conflicting voices in his head who keep dragging up his past all contrive to pin Carlos down further and further.
He hatches a plan to get the fugitives away from the hotel during a World Cup match between Spain and Germany and focuses all his attention in putting it in place. Atxaga prepares the final tragedy of this novel well, planting information and scenarios that only come in to play in the last few pages with a quickening pace that leads to a conclusion that seemed almost inevivtable despite earlier expectations.
The Lone Man is slightly uneven novel but one worth persevering with.

Tenerife

Pilot whales may not be the biggest members of the species in the sea but it is still a special moment when you see them breaking through the surface of the water within almost touching distance.
In the pod that I saw last week, off the coast of Tenerife and heading towards La Gomera, there were fourteen, although there may have been others on the other side of the boat that I didn’t see.
They come to the surface in the mornings, one half of their brains asleep and the other half keeping them floating and breathing. Later in the day and at night they will dive deep below the Atlantic in search of squid, their main source of food.
On the way out to see the whales we had passed a pod of dolphins who were much more lively and at any other time would have been a highlight, but when you’ve seen the playful Fungi off the coast of Kerry his Canarian cousins seemed quite placid by comparison.
Tenerife is probably not the first place a nature lover would think of as a destination of choice as it tends to conjour up images of Brits and Paddy’s with blistered skin lying on a beach after a night out on the rip in a bar called the King George or The Dubliner.
And looking back towards land from the sea where the whales and dolphins swam much of the west coast of Tenerife is a high-rise carbuncle on a barren, rocky landscape.
However, this island, and the entire archipeligo is the result of volcanic eruptions from deep below the waves of the Atlantic and parts of the surface is still smoking and occasionally blasted open by subterranean activity.
From the sea if you look to the north of Playa de los Americas, where most of the mass-tourism activity is situated, you can see Los Gigantes – huge cliffs with gorges cut deep into them.
In one of the gorges is Masca, reached by land via a narrow twisting road that requires stamina to drive along. The village was cut off from the rest of the island until the early 1970s when the road was first built.
Terraces cut into the hillside still provide crops of figs, almonds, aubergines, sweet potatoes and onions and high on the slopes Monte de Aqua, which dominates the skyline inland, lies a rain forest with 20 different species of tree, including pine and laurel.
Masca lies 700 metres above sea level and is popular with hikers who follow a trail from the village down to the shore past darting lizards and below the occasional sea eagle.
A few kilometres north you can see how the island’s mountain range has created two distinct micro-climates that has resulted in a distinctive north south divide with lush green vegetation to the north compared dry arid land to the south where cacti thrive among the blackened contours of lava flows.
At 7,800 metres Mount Tiede dominates Tenerife and on my plane journey in was my first sight of the island as its summit poked through the clouds that covered the rest of the island.
It sits in the centre if El Tiede national park where brown, flecked with black lava flows from the recent (geologically recent in the sense of the last couple of hundred years) sprawl across the landscape.
A huge desert plain stretches out before Mount Tiede, with craggy, petrified magma and scattered cacti recalling the landscape of a thousand American westerns.
In fact this landscape did feature in the film 1,000,000 Years BC in which Raquel Welsh battled the facts of history and some dodgy special effects as placid, tongue-flicking iguanas where cinematically enhanced to make them look like enormous flesh-eating dinosaurs.
Again lizards can be seen darting between the rocks and there more than 200 other species of bird and mammal roaming the volcanic landscape including a rather sinister species of bat known in Spanish as ‘senores de la noche’ – lords of the night.

Jilipollo

One of the pleasures of being a journalist is going on the occasional press trip where a company or organisation will fly you off somewhere in return for some coverage. In the past this has meant trips to Egypt, Jordan, Italy, Denmark, New York, Paris and Turkey to write travel features, to Strasbourg to report on the European Parliament and to Nicaragua to cover the work of the Irish charity Trocaire.
These trips can be challenging, as in my visit to Central America and fairly monotonous as with Strasbourg, but always rewarding.
The press trips to write a travel feature are more fun as journalists tend to be well indulged, taken to all the major sights and the best restaurants so when I was given an opportunity to go to Malaga to research a feature on the Andalucian city's 'cultural tourism' I thought great.
Malaga is a city I've visited often, twice in the last two years. This trip includes visits to the Picassso Museum, Cathedral, castle, gardens and Moorish ruins as well as scheduled stops at tapas bars, top restaurants and winery... yes I'll write that last word again - a winery.
It was an early start this morning, up at 3am, on the road for 3.30 to catch a 6am flight.
By 4.40 I was in the check-in queue and had clocked the two other journos on the trip, by 4.41 I was looking at Sinead's passport in my hands and wondering how the hell I had been so stupid not check that I had lifted the right one.
A quick phone call to Sinead and she was on the road and I was back out of the airport and speeding to a midway point to swap passports and then a mad dash back to Belfast International Airport, back to the carpark, into the terminal building only to be told that the check in had closed and there was no way I was going to catch the flight, even though I was flying at the invitation of the airline.
When I got home I emailed a very grovelling email to the PR company which organised the trip and got a more than sympathetic hearing and and a few hours later confirmation that I have been rebooked to go out tomorrow - although I will be returning late on Saturday.
Anyway as a great philosopher once said 'shit happens'. It will be another early start tomorrow and hanging out in departure lounges and a three-hour flight each way to get there for just over 36 hours in Malaga. But I still regard Spain as a second homeland so hopefully it should be worth it.

Murder in the Central Committee by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

This is the second Pepe Carvalho mystery I have read, and I have another one sitting and ready to go. The Barcelona-based detective travels to Madrid at the request of the Spanish Communist Party to investigate the murder of the party's general secretary Fernando Garrido.
On the downside there are too many characters who drift in for a few paragraphs and who are never seen again. It is also quite heavy on geography and at times I found myself turning to a map of Madrid to keep track of Carvalho's peregrinations, although as a former resident I quite enjoyed picturing once familiar streets and landmarks.
Montalbán was a former communist and was imprisoned for four years under Franco's fascist regime and so Carvalho's memories of a similar fate and knowledge of Spanish left-wing politics ring true.
His fictional detective finds himself liaising with a senior policeman who interrogated him 25 years earlier and threatened to kill him by dropping him from a window. Other characters muse on their own involvement and the way it turned them into fugitives purely because of political beliefs and shaped the lives of their families.
There is slightly more detective work in Murder in the Central Committee than in The Man of My Life and Montalbán plants little nuggets along the way to exercise the reader's mind although the actual revelation of the murderer is more of a 'da da' moment that a gradual exposition.
Once again food plays a major part with saliva-inducing descriptions of meal and at least one recipe.
However, less well written was a set-piece sex scene, which was almost laughable, although it paved the way for a betrayal and a significant twist in the plot.
Like the previous Montalbán novel that I read he uses a fairly straightforward detective story as a vehicle for exploring a politically-edged theme and a commentary on contemporary Spanish life (at least contemporary in the early 1980s when the novel was published and Spain was still emerging from the Franco years into a fledgling democracy).
There is enough going on here to read this as a straight forward detective novel but I think you'd have to 'know' Spain – at least in terms of history and the regional tensions that exist there – to properly 'get' this novel.

The Man of My Life by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

A novel set in Spain, or rather Catalonia, incorporating obscure religious sects, a world-battered outsider, fine wine and Mediterranean cooking was just too much for me to ignore. I’d never heard of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán until I spotted this in No Alibis bookshop in Belfast but now I will probably have to track down the rest of the novels in the Pepe Carvalho series.
The plot is flimsy and the writing is not great – although this is a translation – but there is a lot crammed into this supposed crime-fiction-genre novel – there are at least three recipes in here and dozens of other references to food, which had me salivating and on one occasion running to my larder and fridge to see if I could at least approximate one of the dishes.
In the course of trying to track down the murderer of the son of a leading businessman, the Barcelona based detective Carvalho also manages to reignite affairs with two former lovers, ruminate on the nature of nationalism and Catalan separatism, Cathars, Satanists and Barcelona Football Club.
The original Spanish (Castilian) title of the novel was El Hombre de mi Vida, which sounds a bit like the title of a movie by Pedro Almodovar. However, the cinematic backdrop, at least in terms of location, is probably more akin to Woody Allen’s New York as Montalbán leads us through the streets of Barcelona, past and present, lamenting the destruction of the old and celebrating its revitalization.
Montalbán ruminates on Catalan nationalism, how an autonomous region of Spain can assert its identity while incorporated in a nation state that itself is being slowly amalgamated into the larger, bureaucratic machine that is the European Union. The text is splattered with Catalan phrases and bits of folklore.
The plot is as much a platform for Montalbán to rehearse his take on globalization and an interesting take on Satanism – “God is lord of this world, and Satan is the negation of the idea that his creation is good. Satan is our critical intelligence, the culture of resistance.” (P178).
A pro-globalisation activists discussing Catalan nationalism says: “nations built on sentiment are an obstacle… that’s why we have to create them and destroy them at the same time”. (P192).
This is as much a novel of ideas rather than a great story, although the last 30 pages do re-engage with the traditional novel form and re-humanise the detective Carvalho and lift him from being a purely philosophical, and occasional culinary literary vehicle, into that old favourite of a hard-bitten detective on whom life has crapped and left him nothing to wipe himself clean with.

Mi vida española

IT'S not easy being Spanish when you haven't got a drop of Spanish blood in your body and live in Ireland - but I try.
My day usually starts with a cafe con leche and a bit of bread while I sit and watch the news on 24H, an online news channel broadcast by Televisión Española. A couple of times a month I will pick up a copy of El Pais (which is usually a day out of date).
Lunch is often paella, tortilla español (potato omelet), sopa Castellano (garlic, egg and chorizo soup), or gambas a la plancha con ensalada (grilled prawns with salad). Sometimes I might have a copa de tinto (small glass of wine) with my lunch.
Other Spanish delicacies are harder to come by. There is a shop in Belfast which sells boquerones (anchovies in vinegar) - but they are absurdly expensive. As for navajas (razor clams) I have never even seen them on a restaurant menu in Ireland.
There is a continental market being held in the centre of Belfast at the minute which sells churros (deep fried strips of donut) but it is not quite the same standing outside in a frosty December and eating them as sitting in warm bar in Madrid with cup of hot chocolate to dip them in.
In terms of music I have a decent selection of Flamenco, Galician traditional music and more contemporary Spanish artists – including Mano Chao, Los Rodrigues, Celtas Cortos – and quite a lot of very dodgy Spanish pop. Thanks to broadband I can also listen to a lot of Spanish radio stations.
I also enjoy Spanish (and South American) cinema and would probably rate the Pedro Almodovar film Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her) as my favourite movie.
I've spent quite a bit of time in Spain, teaching in Madrid and working in the tourism industry in Mallorca and in Andalucia - but that was in the early 1990s. However, I still go back when I can, I was there in June this year, 10 days last year and a fortnight the year before that.
My Spanish is flawed and very ungrammatical but it is a language I am fairly competent in. Technically I should be able to speak Irish at least as well but I lack the confidence to launch into a conversation and worry that I'm using the wrong tense or transposing English idioms.
No such problem with Spanish... if I don't know how to say something I'll find my way around it and have often launched into topics of conversation with absolutely no idea of how I'm going to construct a sentence.
For the most part I find that I am understood and I can usually understand what is being said back - watching Spanish television and listening to the radio has also helped, as has reading the papers, in print and online.
Of course there are nuances of Spanish life that I will never master and like anywhere else there are vast regional differences that tend to be glossed over in the overall outsider’s image of Spain.
I am fairly au-fait with the broader politics concerning the Basque issue and Catalan autonomy but I have found it best to avoid getting involved in debate - it is a bit like an outsider coming to Ireland and launching into a conversation about constitutional issues here.
I occasionally muse on the possibility of going back to live in Spain. Maybe not in Madrid which is a much bigger and much more complicated city than the one I remember, although I'm sure I could adapt.
I quite fancy Malaga. It is on the coast of Andalucia, within easy reach of Seville, Granada and Cordoba as well as the northern coast of Africa. Given the huge ex-pat population living down the coast on the Costa Del Sol and the number of holiday makers who come to the region there would be plenty of work for an English speaker.
But while I enjoy a hot climate I also like a bit of rain now and again and so I think I would be more suited to a northern city - Zaragoza, Valladolid, or even Santiago de Compostella in Galicia.
However, maybe I'm simply deluding myself that is what I want. Could I really live without being close to the Mourne Mountains or my favourite coastal walks.
I have quite a romantic image of Spain and eulogise it because of the memories I have of the times I spent there. But I was in my twenties when I lived there, was much more sociable and enjoyed going out and meeting people. Now I prefer taking it easy with a quiet glass of wine and a bit of music.
No reason why I couldn't do that still but there are other factors - not least Sinead who quite likes Spain but who might not necessarily want to live there.
There is also the danger that I am simply deluding myself that I would prefer life there. I remember a couple of years ago dropping off a hire car at Barajas Airport in Madrid and when the guy who worked in the office saw my passport he started lamenting how he'd spent the best year of his life in Ireland and would love to come back and live here. We almost agreed to swap lives.
I wonder if he wakes up in the morning and makes a cup of tea and toast and has fish fingers with beans or a big greasy fry for lunch and yearns for sausages and champ accompanied by a pint of Guinness for his evening meal?