HUGGING THE BOAB - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

Two-thirds of this short story collection, centers on the absurd world of the ex-pat and the exile. It is a rich and bathetic mine of tragicomedy. The stories set in Egypt and Ecuador have coalesced around the buffoonish dyspeptic alcoholic Belshaw in Egypt, and the curmudgeonly ‘I’ of the Ecuadorian stories. These people are archetypes of course, but they are individuals too; choleric mediocrities at war with the modern world and in retreat from themselves and a Britain they no longer recognize. They drink too much, are savagely henpecked and endure the profound humiliation that they are only successful because they live in The Third World. Life, as it does all over the world that was once ‘the pink in the map’, revolves around a bar or hotel, which in Alexandria is ‘The Portugese Club’, a grubby, sweaty hole, all cigarette-burnt swirly carpets and red plush, and in Quito, the Hotel Quito; a faded monument to the swinging ‘sixties. The setting is exotic, vivacious, colourfull even, but their lives are strangely tawdry and as dull, in some ways, as any lived in the suburbs of this Septic Isle. These are stories about second raters who yearn for a Britain-that-never-was and live out lives of unearned privilege. The talk is always the same - Marmite, Branston Pickle, a good pint, cricket scores and Bolton Wanderers, and the moaning only stops at Closing Time. Yet, the light-stunned setting of the stories will not be denied and impossible things, magical things, happen in these improbable places; full as they are of saturnine barman, scheming brujas, freckle-hazed Australian hippies, evil Boabs, and pantomime Irishmen.

The last third of the collection has Britain for its setting; but a haunted Britain in many ways – a country of broken dreams, dashed hopes, ghosts, guisers, banshees and shades.

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