Some people absolutely hate Manuel Vazquez Montalban's Pepe Carvalho books, and I can understand why. They're not easy. They're tricksy, full of in-jokes, intellectual flights of fancy, extended tributes to and parodies of various philosophical, political and culinary belief systems. You can sometimes feel the translator about to explode as he tussles with Catalan and Spanish puns. The plots can appear simplistic and clumsy, but they're really not the point. Murder in the Central Committee is the best book about the failure of socialism I've ever read. All of them are sumptuously, brilliantly detailed on food and sex, to the extend that it can all be a bit...upsetting. They're very funny. And deadly serious.
At first you think that Pepe's habit of lighting fires at home with books from his shelves - all ones he's read, incidentally - is a running gag. It's not. This is a writer who was imprisoned under Franco. A post-Marxist whose hero is disillusioned but still, rampantly passionate about politics, really. Pepe is both dissolute and highly moral, with a heart of golden truffle. And he knows the one true way to make paella.
Maybe you're thinking, wait a minute: is this Montalbano in another guise? Well, no, but there is a connection. Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian Inspector was named in tribute to Manuel Vazquez Montalban, and they share an obsession with food, sex and the ugliness of illicit power. Camilleri's politics are close to his late Spanish colleague's too. 'Late', as alas, Montalban died in 2003, in - and I'm sure he would have appreciated this - Bangkok, on his way back to Barcelona from Australia.
Most of the Carvalho novels use Barcelona, Catalonia, and greater Spain as settings for examinations of political and moral meltdown, often in the run-up to the Barcelona Olympics, as Carvalho's beloved city is exploited, demolished and corrupted in the name of progress. But the masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned, is The Buenos Aires Quintet, a single novel in five section, in which Carvalho goes to Argentina, ostensibly to find a missing person.
What Montalban does is use the change in setting to examine the issues of dictatorship, revolution, terrorism and resistance, as well as war and mass murder, in a way his personal involvement with Spanish history made impossible in his native land. In other words, it's a book as much about Spain as it is about Argentina. It's also about sex, the tango, beef, agriculture and, yes, cooking, with one of the best, most spectacularly gruesome and viciously hilarious meals in literary history at its climax. It's a real, cry-your-eyes out tragedy too. There's an extended take-off of Borges and some Gabriel Garcia Marquez just to keep you on your toes.
The only post-Buenos Aries Quintet book I can find in English is The Man of My Life, which as a Scot facing a referendum vote on independence I found extraordinarily interesting. It deals with attempts to set up a secret intelligence service for an independent Catalonia, long before such an entity has any hope of existing. Everything ends up mired in rampant corruption, bloodshed and death. And food, obviously.
Of course, it could never happen here...
The books can be difficult to find in translation, only a few are still in print, and there is a huge hinterland of writing in Spanish, including cookery and politics, that I'll never tackle. But the Carvalho books, in English, are like nothing else on earth.
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