Ghosts Of Spain: Travels Through Spain And Its Silent Past, by Giles Tremlett

This book is a good example of the sort of reportage that explains why journalists are so widely hated, and so deservedly so, in the contemporary world. The author’s casual embrace of corrupt influence peddling, inability to grasp Basque, Catalan, or Galician nationalism, as different as they all happen to be, leftist political biases, and his lack of social graces in viewing his interactions with others as the source of copy to be written about when it suits the author are all aspects of contemporary journalism that tend to make the profession viewed as a professional leper class by many others. The author himself is an English journalist who writes as a foreign correspondent in Spain, and seems to appreciate the moral laxity of Spain in his own life as he visits seedy gitano areas, talks about fear with Basques, engages in politically biased discussions of everything from Franco’s Spain to the complications of identity with the various Spanish nationalities. In reading this book it is obvious that the author is pro-socialist and equally obvious that he is a massive security risk to anyone willing to talk to him and find their words used as a way to color the author’s struggle to understand the massive divisions within the Spanish soul, which comes up in many ways that connect to tangles in politics, religion, and identity that the author is ill-equipped to understand.

This book is between 350 and 400 pages, divided into thirteen chapters that seek to discuss one or another element of Spanish history and culture that strikes the author’s unsystematic fancy. The author begins, troublingly, with a discussion about the important matter of the Spanish Civil War, which the author is unable to deal with in a reasonable or even-handed manner, setting the tone for the rest of the book. The first chapter has the author discussing open secrets that no one can talk about (1) and the next one shows the author looking for Franco and completely unable to understand or appreciate him because of his own biases (2). After that the author stumbles badly in his cavalier treatment of the pact of forgetting (3), before turning abruptly from high politics to the politics of permissive Spanish sexuality (4). This is followed by a discussion of the Spanish tension between anarchy and order that he finds particularly present in the chaotic and often corrupt Spanish local politics (5) as well as the chaotic relationship of religion, flamenco, gypsy identity, and drugs (6). The author spends an essay trying to understand the complexities and paradoxes of the Spanish theory and practice when it comes to prostitution (7), before moving awkwardly to a discussion of the Spanish view of doctors and family life, which seems to involve few kids, imported help, and a strong gender divide to housework (8). At this point the author veers strongly into awkward matters of identity politics in the next four chapters, with chapters on the fraught relationship between Muslims and Christians and terrorism (9), the identity of the Basques (10), Catalans (11), and Galicians (12). The book then closes with a discussion of cinema and the struggle of small towns to endure in the face of persistent depopulation (13), after which the book ends with acknowledgements and an index.

While the author himself is a malign presence in this book, it just so happens that a lot of what the author writes about, apart from his own self-insertion as being the real subject of interest in much of what is written, is genuinely interesting. No serious traveler who visits Spain can fail to be struck by the austere natural beauty the Spain has in its isolated areas, the complicated politics of the place and the tensions that Spaniards have within their regions and with the supposed wholeness and integrity of their territory. Interestingly, for all that the author writes about Spanish politics, he barely mentions Gibraltar and Ceuta, or the Balearic Islands, and the Canary Islands do not figure in his writings at all, which is demonstrative of the author’s focus on popular cities. Only a little bit is said about Asturias, Navarre, or the massive empty space outside of Madrid except as a way to demonize Franco or celebrate Almodóvar. A reader with a better understanding of what drives people apart and makes federalism so elusive in a place like Spain, or what makes Galicians seem so inscrutable and full of ironic subtlety in their silence will find more insight in what the author uncovers in his travels than the author shows himself. It is no mean feat to spend nearly 400 pages talking about the silence of Spain, much of that spent talking about and openly showing partisanship in various disputes where the author demonstrates himself to be a leftist who is committed to globalism and deeply ambivalent about his own identity and legacy as an Englishman. A less self-serious person would have written this account as a tragicomic attempt by a clueless Englishman to understand Spain and fit in, but the author lacks the self-awareness and self-deprecation for that task.