Don’t Miss the Fiesta! – David Baird

Whatever you do, don’t judge this book by its cover or its title. It’s a good read and a gripping one.
 
I don’t know what it is about his titles, but it’s as if David writes what he wants to say and then lets a flippant publisher call it whatever they like. Sunny Side Up was another one.
 
I couldn’t not find the story interesting. The setting is a small, isolated village in the hilly uplands of Granada, another patch of which has been my home for thirty years. David has lived in a similar spot for longer than that. Anyway, on every page were scenes and voices, attitudes and a way of life that I recognized intimately.
 
David Baird is one of those modest authors who lets a story write itself. His affection and respect for Andalucian village life and its people are patent and there’s natural humour here. At a wedding, when the bride is hit in the face by a handful of rice, her mother “belaboured the guilty youth with her handbag and a much sharper tool, her voice.”
 
Yet faithfulness to another kind of truth makes for a tense plot and a blood-tingling climax.
 
The sierra’s air is tough and clear, more still than stormy. Its unaffected people can be the salt of the earth, imbued with its native warmth, or shot through with distrust and even animosity towards the outsider.
 
Franco’s National Catholicism still lurks and festers in many a mind and outpost. In Baird’s fictional Benamargo, an overbearing priest rules with iron rod as judge and jury.
 
Trust ardour between a foreigner and a local girl to stir things up.
 
The passions of romance and Christ become darkly entangled. Goaded by the priest, the village’s partisan politics and parochial mentality of censure turn violent. Although the outcome appears as fated as in a classical tragedy, it may not be what you imagined.
 
The story struck a major chord with me, because the cruelty attending a certain Spanish conservatism is something I sought to bring out in The Asturian Campaign, so that it felt like meeting a kindred spirit.