An Irishwoman's Diary

COMPARING real life to fiction is like looking for the differences between a shoe and a foot, the author Martin Amis believes. The delicate tip and heel of a woman’s shoe “doesn’t look like a foot at all”, he explained at the recent Hay Festival Alhambra in Granada. The pale, smelly and brittle foot is what represents reality – “the shoe is fiction”.

In this part of the world, however, you can’t help but wonder if reality and fiction are loosely entwined. The Alhambra palace, with its lush, green gardens, casts a certain mystical glow over the city of Granada. As you wander around the city’s gleaming marble streets, the snow-tipped peaks of the Sierra Nevada glint in the distance.

Even travelling by car is a surreal experience – particularly if you’re driving. After our arrival at Malaga airport and a quick lunch in the city – where every waiter in the restaurant insisted on holding my five-month-old niece – we decided to head for the festival Granada. This involved three trips around Malaga city, down by the port, past the centro historico and out on to the road to Granada – before finding ourselves back in the centre of town.

After many dirty looks and the odd, fruitless inquiry to other drivers, we finally got on the right road.

It is a striking journey, from the drier, more dusty lands around Malaga with its olive groves and orange trees, to the sub-tropical greens and the orange-lit tunnels through the mountains. Blasting the radio makes it all the more enjoyable – cheesy pop tunes sound so much better in Spanish, and even the ads have an uncannily pleasant ring to them.

Driving on the other side of the road makes you feel as though you’re in some fantasy novel. Everything feels slightly wrong, even when you know you are going the right way – which didn’t happen very often, it has to be said. Road signs seemed to disappear the more I followed them. And just when I got that little glimmer of smugness when we were headed in the right direction, I was forced to do yet another U-turn.

Finally we arrived – promising never to look at the car again – and wandered around the magical streets of Granada city.

Fiction has long had its place in the nooks and crannies of Granada, from the ancient Moorish tales, to the crafted words of Federico García Lorca and American author Washington Irving. You can visit the home of Lorca in Granada city, and the room in the Alhambra where Irving wrote the Tales of the Alhambrain 1829, which kick-started huge international interest in the Moorish palace.

Maybe it was the sun, or the stunning views from the Alhambra out over Granada city, but there was something particularly intimate about the festival. Vikram Seth wandered around with a bottle of Rioja and raised a fist as he read some new poetry: “we drink to dream”. A peacock shrieked in the background as Booker-winner Kiran Desai spoke to a small crowd about the difference between real and unreal pictures of India.

After three days in Granada, we decided to take the car out for a spin before the Martin Amis reading. But within minutes, we took a wrong turn and drove right into a pedestrian zone in the old part of the city.

Crowds of tourists parted like the sea, their backs against the wall, as we edged our way down a narrow, cobbled street along the river. There was no time to admire the Moorish wonder of this quaint, medieval district, or watch the sun glinting on the water. All we saw were puzzled faces glaring into the car. We looked back, apologetically, wondering if we had crossed some mysterious line into an imaginary world. But there was no turning back. All we could do was venture deeper, the road stretching on and on into an everlasting tunnel of humiliation.

Half an hour later we were tucked up safely, if a little shaken, at the reading. The car was parked and the baby asleep in the shade. Memories of our frantic misadventure faded as Amis discussed old age in a touching, sometimes humorous manner.

"Literature, you never told me," Amis exclaimed, explaining how getting old is much worse than anyone has ever dreamt of saying. Before reading from his new book The Pregnant Widow, he described the process of ageing as "perceived ugly syndrome", or like starring in a low-budget horror film – "you save the worst for last".

Amis, now in his late 50s, described the passage toward death as a “journey without maps”. And as the reading finished up, he headed off to visit his mother, who lives in Ronda. I couldn’t help but imagine this great, literary heavyweight navigating the winding Andalucian mountainscape, and wondering if he finds himself, every now and then, reaching for the gear stick on the left hand side. Or if he wonders, sometimes, if he himself is the shoe or the foot.