Great Expectations: The Mallorcan novel

When I was small, and before we moved and the books mostly ended up in the new house's loft, the dining-room had two immense bookcases. There were any number of popular paperbacks, Mickey Spillane and Harold Robbins were both favourites of my father, and huge numbers of hardbacks. These were almost all austere in appearance. Some had dust jackets, but most didn't. They were simple, usually brown in colour with the book's title and author's name embossed in fake gold.

The look of seriousness of the hardbacks appealed to me for some reason; possibly because, so sparing were they by way of external information, that they hinted at mystery. From an early age I became aware of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, all in hardback. But there was one author and one author alone who stood out. Charles Dickens.

The explanation as to why Dickens probably had much to do with the fact that films of his stories were regularly on television. I'm not sure that I understood what I was reading, and would retreat to the safety of Captain W. E. Johns when it all became too complicated, but "Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations" were more than just Alec Guinness or John Mills on the box.

Dickens, were he to still be alive, would have been 200 hundred years old on 7 February. The timeliness of his birth was such that he was perfectly placed to become what he did become - the novelist as social historian and commentator of Victorian times.

Great literature does not have to be contemporaneous in order to acquire the status of great literature, but as a chronicle of the author's own time it can have a credibility over and above that gleaned from research and/or imagination of the past or the future. Dickens was a maker of documentaries long before film or television. In having dealt almost exclusively with the present, his work is profoundly significant as a social record.

The anniversary of Dickens' birth has received a goodly amount of interest and coverage in Mallorca and Spain. In local literary circles he is revered as having been the great author that he was. "Literature would not have been the same without Dickens." So says Palma-born Neus Canyelles, whose fifth book was a novel entitled "La Novella de Dickens" in which an hallucinating heroine holds conversations with Dickens.

The reverence shown towards Dickens just serves to emphasise the fact that Mallorca and the Balearics, for all that there is a strong literary tradition which is taken seriously and proudly, have never produced an author whose works have truly broken out of the islands or Spain and provoked international acclaim.

The one author who has come closest is Llorenç Villalonga. His two best-known works, "Mort de Dama" and "Bearn", published 25 years apart, acquired such a reputation, in Mallorca if nowhere else, that it has been suggested that they inhibited the development of subsequent Mallorcan literature.

Both books had as their theme the Mallorcan aristocracy. To what extent this, as a subject, would hold great appeal to wider audiences is debatable. Nevertheless, they contained some sense of social record.

What is missing, perhaps more than anything where the foreigner is concerned, is an appreciation of this social record of Mallorca. It exists through photography and other media, but through literature there is an almost complete absence because of a lack of translated works. There is no Dickens or anyone who comes anywhere near. Nor is there any contemporary writer who might facilitate a greater awareness of the Mallorcan social condition.

Television and the internet have taken on this mantle to a degree, but neither can do justice in the way that literature can. There are commentators of a different type, the glosadors, who specialise in often improvised, satirical quasi-song monologues, but who can understand any of them? Where literature is concerned, Mallorca is an unwritten book with totally blank pages.

A novelist such as Neus Canyelles can re-create a world in which Dickens appears. She, along with others in the Mallorcan literary tradition, can appreciate the social condition of Victorian England. She can understand Dickens' world because it is an open book.

Without equivalents, a foreigner's appreciation can never be more than superficial. And this superficiality applies both to the past and to the present day. Consequently, and for many people, Mallorca is surface and no more. There is no substance to the island. Somewhere there must be someone who some day will rectify the situation. The great Mallorcan novel has yet to be written.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.