22 Aug 2013 01:11:56
It's not hard to see what draws the reader into this story: we begin with a young, weedy and very unworldly priest being welcomed into a world of rude moral squalor. This is a book about bourgeois virtues, genteel civility and piety clashing with earthy robustness and the sly ways of the countryman. We know what we're in for very early on when the priest, asking the way to the eponymous country estate, is told by some gnarled yokel that it is "no more 'n a dog's trot away", a measure of distance that is frustratingly useless and evasive.
Bazán's genius lies in the way she mixes comedy, farce, realism and heightened-pitch hysteria with a dash of gothic. The House of Ulloa – the place, not the book – is a highly atmospheric ruin, where pretty much all life takes place in a reeking, smoky kitchen, with the marquis himself forcing wine down the throat of his illegitimate four-year-old son. That particular scene takes place fairly early on, to prepare us, I suppose, for any shocks that may come later. The marquis, an amoral roustabout interested only in hunting, is a great character; what Bazán does so cleverly is not simply set him up in opposition to Julián, the milquetoast priest, but at times show them in a weird kind of colloquy.
The atmosphere is at first a bit like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but with jokes. That a novel can cross not only a culture and well over a century (it was first published in 1886) and still produce genuine laughter is pretty impressive; what's more impressive is that Bazán has written a memorably melodramatic tale, the kind that has us keenly anticipating what will happen next. To spot the dramatic ironies multiplying – one finds oneself saying, with foreboding, "what could possibly go wrong?" at numerous points – in no way diminishes the pleasure the book delivers; in fact, it's an integral part of it.
And then there's a part of the story in which an election takes place. The Historical Note that the translators give need only be skimmed, for this episode, which seems at first out of kilter with the rest of the novel, deals with the timeless truths of politics, especially rural politics, where "not even the hypocrites and demagogues pretend to be interested in the loftier, universal issues". I suspect Bazán included this episode in order to get something off her chest about local corruption, but it is so richly, devastatingly and timelessly comic that I wondered whether Evelyn Waugh had read this novel.
That's almost certainly impossible, but there is something reminiscent of Scoop in the way Bazán sees both the crumbling house of Ulloa (compare it with the decrepit family seat of the Boots) and the almost gleeful corruption of local politics, in a population steeped in superstition, ignorance and memories of ancient grudges. Add this to the ferment that Spanish politics was in at the time, and it's like having a front-row seat in a European kind of Ishmaelia.
I should make it clear that when I start invoking Waugh, this is very nearly the highest praise I can give an author. And that Bazán is, I suspect, more politically sound than Waugh was (although her progressives are as ludicrous as her reactionaries) makes her comedy all the more grown-up and biting. People may travel by donkey in this book, but it could have been written yesterday.
