"After the death of Don Juan" by Sylvia Townsend Warner

 As per the opera, Don Juan was dragged down to Hell by devils whilst hosting a dinner for the statue of the father, whom he had killed, of Dona Ana. But the only witness to this was his valet, Leporello. So Ana, newly wed to Don Ottavio, travels to Tenorio to 'break the news' to Don Juan's dad, Don Saturno. While she is there, the peasants agitate for the irrigation Don Saturno has long promised, hoping that the death of his libertine son will stop Don Saturno haemorrhaging money. But is Don Juan actually dead?

This playful little novel has some delightful moments. It hops from one narrator to another while almost always staying the third person past tense; it lacks chapters and sometimes obvious breaks which sometimes made it difficult to know which character was actually speaking. In addition there is a huge cast list: Dona Ana's party numbers at least four and the nobility and servants at Don Saturno's residence is another four or five and then there are the schoolmaster and the miller and the miller's daughter and the village priest and the sacristan and at least a dozen peasants with speaking parts. In this it resembled a grand opera with many voices and it was appropriately brilliant in the ensembles. But in a novel I think this lack of focus makes it more difficult to fully bring out the characters; as a result the characterisations seemed superficial. And when one considers that the author's intent was to provide a commentary on the Spanish Civil War (the book was published in 1938, during that conflict), I suspect that there was too much for what, at 236 pages, is a slender novel. Nevertheless, I felt it was considerably more nuanced than Lolly Willowes, the author's debut, and there is a lot of amusing incident. And the pacing is spot-on: there is a very important turning-point almost ;precisely at the 75% mark.

Selected quotes: (page references are to the Penguin edition)

• "That is how it goes. One begets, one loves, one takes pride in, one gives, one pampers, one is made a fool of, one is bled ... and in the end indulgence defeats the motive of love, and the darling exasperating phoenix of a son dwindles into a habit, and the wound is a dry scar that tickles in rainy weather." (p 58)
• "One would suppose ... that if flame and evils ascended to the first floor, someone in the room below would notice them passing." (p 75)
• "Your grandchildren ornament your roof like young fig-trees." (p 99)
• "The last blow fastens the nail." (p 143)
• "A robber's life is painful enough. To be out in all weathers, night after night to watch with an empty stomach on the mountains, to have the chief part of the world against one - there is not much difference, that I can see, between being a poor robber and being a poor man." (p 146)
• "Were there no ghosts in the family of San Bolso, in the family of Quebrada de Roxas, not a headless man nor a nun of gigantic size among them? How paltry! How deplorable! There could be little credit or satisfaction in serving such ungarnished families." (p 150)
• "Where the herb grows there is an ass to eat it." (p 150)
• "A man whose stupidity, even if you cuckolded him, would rob the act of any reality, for you cannot balance a pair of horns upon a perfectly empty head." (p 155)
• "Dona Pliar, if you will allow me to say so, you have kept your heart too long. It is no good to you now." (p 157)
• "Vulgarity ... is a fleeting perfume, and a few decades can dull our nostrils to it." (p 165)
• "It seemed madness to end a life of twelve years between six in the evening and midnight." (p 195)
• "The loaf comes out as the oven wills." (p 195)
• "The life of a man has its shape, as a tree has its shape. One grows up, one learns a livelihood, one marries a woman and begets children. As one grows older one grows tired and in the end one dies. That is the pattern of the life of man." (p 195)

January 2023; 236 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God