At first sight Barcelona Dreaming, three linked novellas billed as Rupert Thomson’s love letter to the city, appears a somewhat conventional excursion for the author. His last few novels have featured a maker of waxwork depictions of plague victims in renaissance Florence (Secrecy), the voice of a frozen embryo (Katherine Carlyle), lesbian artists in the golden age of surrealism (Never Anyone But You) and vampires (NVK, written under the unimprovable pen name of Temple Drake). But although he plainly adores the place, it should come as no surprise that a Thomson love letter is not so much a starry-eyed document as something sharper, stranger, more unsettling and, ultimately, more revelatory.
For Thomson’s inhabitants of the city – and in a way for the city itself – much hinges on the lingering implications of old emotions, relationships and actions. Wounds stubbornly refuse to close, whether from love affairs gone wrong or love affairs that never were. Crises present themselves or are engineered. In the opening story, “The Giant of Sarrià”, we meet divorced British expat Amy, who one evening hears someone crying in the car park beneath her apartment. There she finds a young Moroccan sex worker, Abdel, whom we later learn has been raped. Amy comforts him with sugary mint tea, gives him money for a taxi and realises she is hopelessly infatuated. He was half her age and she’d “never seen anyone more beautiful”.
In “The King of Castelldefels” former jazz musician Nacho wakes up in a garden he doesn’t recognise, with a hangover. “Everything’s floating, flowing. Brain, skin, lawn – it’s all the same.” Via a series of weirdly plausible events, he is asked to give English lessons to Barcelona’s Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho. “You know, everyday stuff. Football, music – girls ...” While their unlikely arrangement intriguingly colours the surface of the story (“we worked on his pronunciation – especially his h’s, which were far too soft”), the reader is increasingly caught up in a dark undertow evinced by glimpses of Nacho’s first marriage, of his relationship with his much younger girlfriend and her son, and his recollections of shared addictions with an old flame from his touring days.
It is a rare prosaic clunk of exposition when the reader is dutifully informed that Ronnie, as Nacho is soon calling him, had scored “26 goals in all competitions, including two against our bitter rivals, Real Madrid”. But his presence as a ubiquitous celebrity is artfully deployed in the city and therefore in the book as Thomson lays down intricate layers of connective tissue between stories, characters and locations. We first spotted him smiling down from a huge billboard advertising gum in Amy’s story, and then her daughter had noticed him out jogging. Amy’s friend Montse also turns out to be Nacho’s first wife. And Montse and her new husband are close to Jordi, a translator of literary fiction in the final story, “The Carpenter of Montjuïc”, whose entanglement with a shady British businessman unhelpfully impinges on his long, and unrequited, love for a woman he had known since schooldays.
Thomson has always been good at assembling discrete worlds that are invested with a touch of the unearthly. Here there is a hint of fable, with a slightly skewed reality reflecting the dreams, delusions and often fraught emotions on display. The giant in the title of Amy’s story actually materialises; a chest of drawers made of Russian birch “cut by the light of a full moon” exerts a strange pull; Nacho’s perception of the world moves woozily in and out of focus.
Yet throughout there is also a hard clarity in the way light and shade, rough and smooth coexist. Yes, there is tenderness, and much sex, whether hurriedly in a house under construction – “A building site?” an incredulous Montse asks Amy. “Are you out of your mind?” – or on a carpet of warm pine needles in a forest clearing. But violent relationships, mostly off stage, also cast their shadows. Thomson’s Barcelona is similarly defiant in its insistence on complexity. He lived in the city in the mid 00s, around the time the stories are set, and one assumes he is of a mind with Amy when she explains why she decided to stay on after her divorce: the beaches and the mountains and the bars; “the quality of light first thing in the morning”, “the walks to gather wild asparagus in September” and so on. But there is more to it. Thomson is also entranced by dusty forecourts, the pipes and chimneys of the cement factory just out of town, the view at night from the Ronda bridge of the six lane coastal highway below, the smell of “exhaust fumes mingled with frangipani”.
• Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson is published by Corsair (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
