Orwell spotting in Barcelona

I don’t read a great deal of historical fiction.  This isn’t because I’m not interested in history.  I am.  Very much so.  But I find most historical fiction grindingly awful.  For a start, like Sci-fi, which is something else than I can take or leave (and usually leave these days), it is dreadfully prone to bulk but mainly it’s because of the numbing flatness of the characters.  Just as with sci-fi and fantasy I find it so difficult to engage with the characters of historical novels and to feel as if they really do have inner lives, that they eat and drink and live and love and, dare I say it, have sex lives.  Add a good dose of portentousness to that and I generally switch off.

That’s not to say that there aren’t exceptions.  I have devoured most of the Flashman books, which leaven their learning with a wicked humour.   I devoted a month a decade ago, when I was all washed up in East London with hardly anything other books to hand and no television, to an end-to-end read-through of the Patrick O’Brian naval novels, which seemed at the time to avoid most of the great clunks of the genre.   And right now I am halfway through reading Wolf Hall, having put it off until now on account of a (possibly unfair) Hillary Mantel aversion.

But, exceptions apart, me and historical fiction don’t really get on and so I have only myself to blame for being disappointed by the Cathedral of the Sea and of laying it aside, unlikely to ever be completed, forgoing  even the heavily foreshadowed onset of the Black Death.   My reason for picking up this (predictably)dreary tome was that when I go away on holiday I like to have a book with me that provides some supporting colour for the place that I’m visiting, which in this case, in October, was Barcelona.

 

I was all set for Barcelona a couple of years ago, with flights and hotel booked and guidebooks bought, until the whole trip was put paid to by the surprise intervention of that Icelandic volcano and the resultant ash-cloud debacle.  Trading tapas for cream-teas, a hastily organised trip to Dorset had to do in Catalonia’s stead.

To do Dorset justice, that turned out to be a very nice little break, staying in Hardy’s Dorchester and visiting Lyme Regis and Weymouth, with its marvellously gaudy statue of George III, and going off to Bovington to visit T.E. Lawrence’s cottage, the spot on the road where he was killed on his motorcycle, and the beautiful tiny churchyard where he is buried.  The, then, Significant-Other didn’t take too kindly to the Tank Museum at Bovington, being remarkably unimpressed when I explained about how my grandfather had helped to build Churchill tanks and very much less than impressed by banging her head while clambering out of a Mark V tank.  In retrospect this may have been where things started to go wrong. Certainly, it has been with shock and awe that friends have asked “You took your girlfriend to a tank museum?”  *

 

 

But Barcelona remained unvisited.  And like Amsterdam and Dublin and New York it is one of those places that everyone expects you to have visited and somewhere that I genuinely wanted to see.  I had been thinking of Berlin but October in Northern Europe didn’t hold out the prospect of great weather and, since work had been rather fraught, I was looking for a more languid charm than Germany probably offers, and so I dug out the guidebooks and rebooked the same hotel that I had identified previously (thus saving several weary hours on Trip Advisor) and jetted off over the Pyrenees.

Well, it is a beautiful city, Barcelona and I ‘did’ most of the usual sights – the Block of Discord, the Sagrada Familia, the Palau Guell, the Parc Guell, the Miro Museum, the Cathedral, the Bari Gotic, and Santa Maria de la Mer (as featured in the lumpen book I was dragging about with me), all interspersed with liberal coffees and beers and tapas.

I learned a thing or two.  Firstly, that, judging by the number of times I was accosted by ladies of the night and by purveyors of rare herbs and chemicals, Barca is a marvellous place to go to if illicit sex and drugs are your thing.  Secondly, that one should never attempt to eat deep fried shaved artichoke out of doors in anything above a light breeze.

But as a confirmed Orwellist, the most interesting aspect of the trip was the tracking down of the places associated with the great man.  I took coffee at an outside table at the Café Moka on Las Ramblas, where in 1937 the Civil Guards had holed up in the face-off with the POUM militia, George among them, up on the rooftop opposite.  I found my way to the rather down-at-heel Placa George Orwell in the Bari Gotic and was pleased to discover (and eat) the sandwich named in his honour.

*I would, if pressed, go to a frock museum so I’m not sure that I see what the problem is.