Tourist Third
Spanish Adventure. By Norman Lewis. (Collancz. 15s.) MR. LEWIS, a twenty-six-year-old Welshman, has written a clever, colourful and exasperating book, the account of un- comfortable but eventful travels through France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. He set off with a canoe, a congenial companion, and. the strange desire to " wander through Southern Europe in contemplation of our civilisation faced with disruption." In France he very soon encountered a drought which forced him to abandon its waterways and advance more sensibly by train. This was lucky, as the book notably improves when we cross the Pyrenees. While wrestling with that. absurd canoe and the problem of enlivening the discomforts of self-inflicted martyrdom, Mr. Lewis is con- tinually swamped in murky backwaters of the language " In the end a trap yielded edible results in the form of two decidedly animated fish which we tossed into the canoe where they continued to circulate in the accumulation of malodorous liquid which for some time had been fouling our equipment." But, once arrived in Spain, Mr. Lewis is far less persistent in his facetiousness ; in fact, his prose style, always literary though usually lucid, at times reminds one of Mr. Aldous Huxley's.. Probably he would have been glad to avoid so polished an echo, but 'writing comes to hirri too easily, and when he no -longer has to- make. his bricks without quite so many last straws-as, for instance, in his genuinely exciting description of the " troubles " in Madrid-he can write super- latively well. These chapters (X-XVI) .are the best in a short unromantic book.
On entering Spain in " sporting tenue," Mr. Lewis and his companion, " an Englishman of Sicilian birth," were imme- diately recognised as Barbary apes. Undeterred by this reversal of rotes, Mr. Lewis continues to find his surroundings odder than himself,, and by witty and observant writing ';ahnost perstifideS"the reader to this. -view-. The cleverness of
his book consists in leaving out so much and yet :finding enough to say about the places he visits to hold the reader's attention.
His interests arc sociological, morphological, topographical :
man in the mass, as a type, and the individual a ludicrous, if entertaining, survival. Of his twenty-four photographs—
sonic of them decorative—four reproduce the cruder efforts of Communist propaganda ; but his outlook is too intelligent to be merely political.
The fact that his book is snobbish and ingenuous makes it all the more entertaining. Mr. Lewis hiss a strong prejudice in favour of being as uncomfortable as possible and slightly con- temptuous, or at least unimpressed. More perhaps may be said for this anti43aedeker attitude than that one man's picturesque is another man's poison ; for Mr. Lewis has eyes to see, and not only can he make his abstractions interesting, but his visions of the banal too—a decaying hotel, a rickety 'bus, an open road—are exact, vivid and real. On the other hand he studiously avoids anything that the ordinary tourist would consider worth seeing. Pamplona Cathedral, the Prado, Toledo and Salamanca are passed over in silence or with a shrug of the shoulders. Referring to Seville, he remarks that " Manhattan and Dnieperstroy have spoiled our age for that kind of marvel," and although Zaragoza's outline against the evening sky is sufficiently Muscovite to win favour, it is only by comparison with the " sad splendours " of Coimbra—an exiguous piscine, a sombre park, a closed Zoo—that the mediaeval towns of Spain have any beauties to boast. The trouble with such superciliousness is that it involves a falsifica- tion of values and eventually leads to inaccuracy, as in Mr. Lewis's bullfighting chapter. Worse still, we have to read almost a third of this book before we catch the author liking anything : the empty splendour of the Spanish landscape he describes admirably and with enthusiasm ; but quickly he collects himself and seldom again lapses into approval. Yet he is forced to revert to this magnificence and it is the few things he thoroughly enjoyed—the Castilian plains, the revolutionary excitements in Madrid, the dignity of Arabs and the organised romance of . the, Quartier Rherve at Casablanca—that give savour to this slick, overpriced,
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