Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin has got to the logical end of the Tales of the City series and stopped several times before, but his readers — or his publishers — have never let him get away with abandoning Anna Madrigal and the wonderful people who rented rooms in her house on Barbary Lane back in the seventies. Understandable when we had so much fun with those characters in the first few books, but perhaps we really ought to let Maupin move on to something else after nearly fifty years…

In real time the original characters would now all be far too old to have the sort of interesting comic adventures we look for in a Maupin story. Since the younger generation he introduced in the last couple of books are fine for Netflix but a bit out of the range of interest of Maupin and the boomers who actually buy his books, he has now resorted to breaking the sequence and setting this latest instalment thirty years ago, ten years after the events of Babycakes, with Mona and her adopted son Wilfred running a stately home in the Cotswolds. Mona is dallying with Poppy the sub-postmistress, and there’s a vaguely Hitchcockian plot (with shades of Wicker Man) involving some paying guests from North Carolina.

AIDS, Maupin’s old boss Jesse Helms, Thatcher and Clause 28 are still dominant themes (the actual Prime Minister, John Major, doesn’t rate a mention), but the Tories of the 1990s are sometimes clearly just stand-ins for the Tories of the 2020s, and there is a significant sidestep into the very 2020s theme of transphobia, a topic that has never crossed anyone’s mind before in nine books with a main character who is a trans woman.

Obviously, as an American — and worse, as an American now settled in London — writing about Britain, Maupin lays himself open to British readers crowing “Ha-ha!, that’s not how Britain works,” but he’s no Elizabeth George, he has obviously got his British friends to proof-read the manuscript and taken note of their comments, so there are only minor and very unimportant deviations from British reality (e.g. Mona going to the Post Office to collect her mail). He may well have left those in deliberately to tease us.

Of course, it’s nice to meet Mona again — I always felt Maupin pushed her off into the background too quickly in the early books — and to see walk-ons from some of the other core characters, but the plot doesn’t feel as well-engineered as usual, and the dialogue lacks the comic bite of Maupin’s best writing. If you’re already a Maupin fan, you will have bought this book anyway, but if you haven’t met him yet, go and read the early stuff, not this. It doesn’t do him justice.… (más)