Book review: Drought - as good as Graham Greene in parts
The story of a British expatriate, who in the late 1950s quits his job and escapes to the Andalusian mountain village of Benalamar, Drought offers a saga of colonialism and its discontents
Ronald Fraser's Drought is an uneven novel, but when it is good, it is very, very good - as in Graham Greene good.
The story of a British expatriate named John, who in the late 1950s quits his newspaper job and escapes to the Andalusian mountain village of Benalamar, Drought offers a saga of colonialism and its discontents. Benalamar is a degraded landscape; its farms have no water, and a generation later, it remains riven by the Spanish civil war's tensions.
"No one wants to come here; no one wants to stay," Fraser tells us. No one, that is, except John and his countryman Bob, a developer with a vision for the future: "large houses hidden by walls and eucalyptus, svelte lawns and swimming pools rapidly glimpsed, an 18-hole golf course ... something more like a country club estate."
For Bob, the key is the dam he is building, which will bring water to the farmers while also increasing the value of their land. What he is after, then, is opportunity, what Fraser calls "a new form of colonisation: mass tourism", although John understands this is a false faith, through which community and culture will be flattened. The transformation of the village, in other words, essentially spells its demise.