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Email a friendBizarre Spanish novel gets lost in translation
ORIGINALLY written in Spanish, Rafael Reig's Blood on the Saddle is set in a semi-flooded Madrid a little into the future. The Communist Party has won the elections in Spain, inciting the US to invade the Iberian peninsula. The oil has run out, Anglo is the official language and novelists are back using typewriters. Worse, they are writing cowboy novels.
Religious maniacs who read these cowboy novels identify - worse still, believe - in the books' heroes.
Men who father disabled children, of whom there appears to be rather a lot, are forced to have a vasectomy. The hero, or anti-hero, private detective Carlos Clot has a disabled daughter who competes in the Paralympics.
Clot, like many fictional detectives, is an alcoholic. He cycles and boats his way around the drug and drink-sodden metropolis in pursuit of missing - or allegedly missing - persons.
Thanks to his industry and enthusiasm, he falls foul of Manex Chopeitia, head of the genetic-engineering company that rules over the capital and the destiny of the US-Iberian Federation.
Characters run away from their authors - a new take on writer's block - and another of Clot's specialities is finding these eccentric runaways. So it's Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo meets Luigi Pirandella meets Mat Coward meets cowboy fiction.
At one stage, a magician saws his assistant in half and someone steals the lower half. Clot is left clinging to the head as he goes in pursuit of the rest. It makes a change from looking for missing - whole - persons, even escapees from a novel. Eventually, the two halves of the magician's assistant are reunited and Clot falls in love with them/her. A touch of Mills and Boon, as well.
The blurb on the cover describes the novel as "clever, funny and very readable." It is quite clever, but I found it neither funny nor very readable. Maybe it has lost something in translation.
GWYN GRIFFITHS