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The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin, book review: 'A touching farewell as the Tales come to the end of the road'

 

Richard Canning
Wednesday 29 January 2014 01:00 GMT
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Fans of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series will welcome this, its ninth volume over three decades – while understandably wondering just how many "days" its 92-year old transsexual heroine can expect to face.

Maupin already conceded, recently, that this book will end the series – though he already closed it once, after 1989's Sure of You, in which primary gay character, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver came out as HIV-positive. The then calamity of the Aids epidemic afforded no means by which the author could keep the gossamer tone of the Tales afloat – or keep the brace of characters intrinsic to them breathing.

Two non-Tales novels followed – Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener: each interesting, but neither fully satisfying. The advent of combination therapies enabled Maupin to reopen the magical fictional world of "Barbary Lane". The series again had a future, once Mouse had one too.

Michael Tolliver Lives (2007) proved the point – but awkwardly adopted a first-person narrative voice, limiting the perspectives and dramatic contours available. Fortunately, 2010's Mary Ann in Autumn saw Maupin firmly back in control. Two new characters took centre stage – Jake, Madrigal's transgendered lodger, and Mouse's much younger partner, Ben.

Jake and Ben play a full role too in The Days of Anna Madrigal, which proves just as taut and inventive in its plotting – and as radical in its pursuit of distinctively alternative values and ways of living to celebrate. Jake and Ben generously bridge the generational divide. For increasingly, where sexual and gender identity threatened to separate Maupin's protagonists in the Seventies, differences imposed by age look most challenging today.

Yet, as always, a fairy-tale-like sense of reciprocal loyalty ensures that they dissent or dissociate very little, ultimately conceding far more – and loving an awful lot. Loss, paradoxically, becomes a prime, shared quantity. One primary character, Mona, was lost years ago to cancer and throughout The Days of Anna Madrigal, mortality looks set to stake a further claim.

Undaunted, the now less than sprightly Madrigal follows her clan to the Burning Man arts festival in the Nevadan desert – a trip that triggers an extraordinary mental journey back to her scarcely sketched childhood nearby.

Tales aficionados will delight in the many improvised manifestations of "family" or "relationship" which proliferate then and now. And Mouse is allowed a Wildean quip to his partner, in discussing gay marriage, sperm "gifting", insemination and more: "I can't help it – I'm old-fashioned. I believe marriage is between a man and a man."

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