BOOK OF THE DAY: Sacred Sierra: A Year on a Spanish MountainBy Jason Webster Chatto Windus pp 349, £12.99
‘A LIVING landscape that whispers to you quietly” is Jason Webster’s gentle judgment on Penyagolosa, the mountainous part of Castellón to the north of Alicante where he moved in 2004 to live and farm with his partner, Salud. Webster has already delighted aficionados of Spain’s distinct cultural heritage with enjoyable books on flamenco in Duende, the Moorish heritage of southern Spain in Andalus, and, less light-heartedly, the problematic legacy of the civil war in Guerra. In Sacred Sierra, he connects with the ancient rhythms of rural life, depicting them with a vivid mixture of empathy, ironic distance and nostalgic longing for escape from the rat-race of modern city life.
There is, of course, a distinguished tradition of English-language writing about Spain: the 19th century works of George Borrow and Richard Ford; Gerald Brennan’s still classic account of the origins of the civil war and George Orwell’s iconic experience of it in Barcelona; and more recently from Ireland, fiction and travel writing by Kate O’Brien and Colm Tóibín. There is, too, a contemporary fashion for amusing narratives of rural living in semi-familiar climes such as Provence or Tuscany.
Webster offers both the humorous depictions of local traditions and idiosyncratic figures that we might expect, and a more searching Sebaldian perception of historical events that have shaped society.
Webster deliberately flees the city to take on the challenge of a run-down mountain farm with oak and olive trees untended for years, terraces covered in weeds and gorse, and water supplied only by a distant well. He tries truffle cultivation – although he won’t know the results for about a decade: this is not intensive, high-tech farming. He attempts to keep bees, only to lose several hives in his first winter. And he tries almond and olive harvesting, finding his crop abysmally small, if satisfying for its very existence.
Sacred Sierra follows the pattern of the agricultural year, and is divided into four elemental sections entitled Earth, Air, Water and Fire. It begins in the autumn, with the preparation of the land, and each chapter follows a particular month’s activities, opening with a folk story and a quotation from a Moorish agricultural manual. It is thus that Webster fuses local lore with Spain’s ancient heritage.
He is sensitive to the changing landscape around him, from ancient transhumance routes and abandoned convents, to the forgotten hideouts of the maquis (guerrilla resistance fighters from the early years of the Franco regime), and finally to the contemporary threat of a new power station and a tourist-oriented development plan for the Castellón coast.
A host of intriguing characters populate the pages. We meet El Clossa, an amazing “Speedy Gonzalez” on crutches, who is possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the area and is intent on showing Webster its nooks and crannies – dinosaur bones, religious shrines, the best bar. There is an unrepentant anarchist postman, a political activist determined to resist the environmental destruction that could follow the region’s development plan, and even a local witch who gives up sorcery to become a car saleswoman in Barcelona.
Webster’s book offers a blast of sunshine, full of wholesome, comic efforts at old-fashioned farming, wry observations about mountain attitudes, and, albeit with a nostalgic perspective on that old chestnut of rural authenticity versus modern progress, an optimistic vision of life.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lecturers in Spanish at UCD. Her next book, A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite, co-authored with Catherine O’Leary, will be published by Tamesis in March