A LOAD OF BULL: An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid
by Tim Parfitt
Macmillan £10.99 pp279

Earlier this year, to mark 70 years since the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, the correspondent Giles Tremlett published Ghosts of Spain, a fascinating account of the war’s legacy, and Antony Beevor produced a new version of his classic history, The Spanish Civil War. Now comes Jason Webster’s offering.

Unlike Beevor, a historian, and Tremlett, a journalist, Webster is a travel writer, who has spent more than a decade in Spain. Travel is a most British and versatile literary genre, a cocktail of writing, from biography to history. But, as so often with cocktails, you have to choose the ingredients with care. Webster has used the genre with mixed results, producing a colourful and convincing view of modern flamenco in his first book, Duende, and struggling with Spain’s Moorish legacy in Andalus. In Guerra, he completes his Spanish trilogy by peering into the shadows left by the war, in a book that both fascinates and frustrates.

As part of the transition from dictatorship to democratic monarchy, Spain’s power brokers agreed there would be no post-Franco war trials, no South African-style Truth Commission. Memories were left to fade. But, as Webster discovers, the past is not a terribly distant land — divisions have not healed completely, some wounds have festered and the nightmare of fascism has not ended. In a vividly constructed scene, Webster finds himself at a public fight between a fascist local boy and a mulatto. The fight’s no-rules brutality is shocking, but the crowd’s response is more so as they bay for the mulatto’s blood.

“There was a side to Spain that I had not wanted to acknowledge,” Webster writes. He has been seduced by the exoticism of flamenco and the beauty of Moorish Andalucia. Now, disgusted by the violence of fascism and provoked by his neighbour’s mention of an untouched civil-war mass grave, he sets out to reveal the country’s murky past. He does this by alternating his own journeys to civil-war sites with accounts of some key moments in the conflict. Some of these are written with considerable power and beauty — he gives a convincing portrait, for instance, of a nervous Franco destroying his identity papers so as not to be caught when the coup begins. And his account of the arrest and execution of the poet Lorca is laced with tragedy. But a few of the personal moments are less successful. He deflates one’s emotion at Lorca’s murder by adding his own disagreement with a taxi driver at the scene of the murder. Elsewhere, he gives accounts of being robbed in Saragossa and arrested in Morocco that reveal next to nothing about Spain and the civil war and little of interest about the author. Somewhere, here, there is a book of serious reportage struggling towards the light, but it has been obscured by some extremely indulgent travel writing.

I thought of Webster’s indulgence as I read Tim Parfitt’s A Load of Bull, presented as “an Englishman’s adventures in Madrid”, but he is no ordinary Englishman. Or rather, he has his ordinary side and, like most young men alone in the capital, he drinks too much, sleeps too little and is obsessed about getting laid. But his job is unusual, for he is a star of Condé Nast publishing, sent from London for six weeks to help launch Spanish Vogue; nine years on he is still there, as managing director of Condé Nast Spain.

Parfitt tells his story with a light touch and his neat line in self-deprecating humour helps him over any indulgences and perfectly suits his tales of long lunches with leggy models, soirées with Madrid’s beau monde, and long nights in search of a bed mate. But this lad’s tale of growing up is of interest because it takes place against the backdrop of liberality that was sweeping through the Spanish capital when he arrived in the late 1980s, epitomised by the films of Pedro Almodovar (who has a walk-on role).

As Parfitt revels in the fun, scarcely able to believe his luck at being in that place at that time, he nods gently at the seismic cultural changes taking place around him, noting that Spanish Vogue was being launched only 13 years after Franco’s death, and recognising the plight of pijos, Spanish “Sloanes”, who were ‘frustrated that someone like Franco was not still around, yet also frustrated and embarrassed that he once was”. Parfitt’s story fails to live up to its title, but does provide an entertaining urban spin on the old tale of Brits having fun under the Spanish sun.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.69 (Webster) and £9.89 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Times Recommends

• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict