Dark Vales
Raimon Casellas
Alan Yates, translator
Dedalus European Classics £9.99
(978-1-909232-61-7)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT217
)
CATALAN literature barely features on the radar of most British
readers. Indeed, most of us would be hard-pressed to name a single
author from Catalonia. Until the death of General Franco, the
language was subjected to state-sponsored harassment. Hence, this
book, published at the end of the 19th century, was really
rediscovered only in 1980, and is only now appearing in
English.
The dark vales of the novel are a real place, located about 20
miles from Barcelona, but at the end of the 19th century remote,
rural, and backward. It was a place that the author knew well, and
the book is filled with portraits of the various characters who
make their miserable livings in these isolated spots. The plot,
which really gets into gear only about halfway through the book,
after numerous episodes and vignettes, concerns the new priest, who
has arrived to find the church in ruins.
This man, Fr Llàtzer, has been exiled to the back of beyond for
some theological fault, which is never properly explained. He is
accompanied by a very pious old couple. The priest is well-meaning,
but the peasantry are hostile, and very soon things go badly
wrongfor him, and he is rejected by his parishioners.
It is a grim tale, and I wonder why it should be so terrible.
The introduction tells us that the author committed suicide, and
that this fact has its impact on the way we read the book. It is,
at first sight, a novel about the hardness of the clerical life,
especially in places where the priest may be the only educated
member of the community, and share little of their background; but
it is much more than just that: it is a parable about the
impossibility of progress, and how the well-meaning often end up in
despair.
Does the novel give the reader a flavour of Catalan culture? It
certainly alerts him or her to the anti-clericalism that we read of
in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, but, apart from
that, this tragic story has little to do with the place some of us
know today.
Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith is the author of Narrative
Theology and Moral Theology (Ashgate, 2007).