A Light Comedy, by Eduardo Mendoza, translated by Nick Caistor

A Spanish tragedy of privilege and ennui

The years following Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War were full of fear and poverty, censorship, reprisals and submission. Unless, of course, you were rich, like Eduardo Mendoza's hero, Carlos Prullas, playwright and playboy. In which case, life was an amusing game of flirting, intrigue and play-work, bolstered by an agreeable routine of leisurely perusal of the paper, then lunch, or a clandestine assignation.

The only wrinkle is that however protected by privilege you may be from the suffering underclass, you couldn't actually avoid it. You had either to defy or engage with the desperation of those crushed by Franco's dictatorship. There is material here for a Tolstoyan tragedy, a Zolaesque moral epic, or Waugh-style satire.

This is none of these. Prullas is agreeable enough, his stage comedies a light counterpoint to the dark dramas swirling in the wings, his girlfriends charming and off-beat, although condescendingly portrayed in the style of the epoch. But he is one of those who will always emerge unscathed, whatever horrors he must undergo.

A local mafioso is stabbed and Prullas becomes embroiled as chief suspect. He attempts to extricate himself by appealing to influential friends, each more cynical and bonkers than the next, but only digs himself in deeper. The action swings between Barcelona, where he lives, and a nearby resort where his wife and children are spending a sweltering summer. This much is conveyed convincingly enough to make us grasp the central message: no one can escape the oppressive, misogynist, stifling hypocrisy of Francoism.

But I never cared enough about Don Carlos, or his seedy childhood friend Gaudet, his easy-going wife Martita, or his unhinged amour Marichuli, to feel their suffering. They left me cold because we know they have mostly brought everything upon themselves by their vanity and idleness, and are bound to be saved by money and connections in the end.

Prullas gets hijacked by gypsies, knifeboys of the Barcelona underworld, a stage peopled by music-hall caricatures given a ghastly cod Oirish or Glasgae patois by the usually deft translator, Nick Caistor. I almost lost the will to read on, convinced that Prullas was in no danger of losing his life to a couple of drunken delinquents on deserted wasteland.

The melodramatic finale accordingly lacks suspense. Forgive me for revealing that a golden-hearted prostitute intervenes, then father-in-law shimmies to the rescue. Our hero can abandon the precarious world of stage farce just as the theatre is eclipsed by the cinema as the drug that lightens ordinary Spaniards' leaden existence. The horrors of a surreal, overheated summer are smoothed away. It's neither light comedy, nor the searing drama the setting deserves; just heavy going.

The reviewer's cultural companion to Madrid is published by Signal Books