My Weekly Book

More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin

Reading this book reminded me of the experience of watching one of those wonderful circus acts where a seemingly impossible number of plates are kept spinning on poles for longer than you would have thought possible. In this second volume of the Tales of the City series we meet all our old friends from 28 Barbary Lane – and life has certainly not stood still for any of them. Mary Ann and Michael continue their respective quests for Mr Right and become entangled in an unsettling mystery for their pains. Mona goes to the desert to find herself and comes back with more than she bargained for. Mrs Madrigal reveals a big secret and Brian finds he’s taken on more than he can handle when a mystery woman appears in his life. Outside the Barbary Lane coterie, DeDe Halcyon Day finds her life going in directions that she could never possibly have imagined and the corpse of Norman Neal Williams refuses to stay buried. As far as it ever was buried in the first place, that is.

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The thing that’s so incredible is that barely any of these stories are relegated to a subordinate position in the narrative. And they’re well-paced enough to ensure that once again it’s virtually impossible to put this book down once you start reading it. It’s an impressive juggling act. All those characters not caught up in truly life-changing events are on the trail of an incredible criminal conspiracy instead. As soon as you take your eye off one of them, another has a crisis, a triumph or a revelation. Despite the fact it was written as a serial the book has arguably more overall coherence and a better narrative structure than its predecessor and I was agreeably surprised at how cohesive it felt, how well the climaxes to the various stories built and how tidy the ending was. Also I found that I really cared about these characters and what happened to them, especially when one or two of them found themselves in a particularly dark place.

The mix includes plenty of wonderful humour – Mona, for example, deciding that a particularly surreal turn of events is best explained as an acid flashback and resignedly waiting for the big purple caterpillars to start crawling up the walls, or Michael pursuing his favourite gynaecologist round an airport arrivals lounge on roller skates (this truly was a more innocent time - he’d probably be shot if he tried that now). But I think it has a darker tinge than the previous volume and I know that, if I’m honest with myself, it’s pretty likely that people are going to get hurt and have their illusions shattered as the series continues. So it was good to leave them in a pretty well-resolved state at the end of this novel without trying too hard to second-guess what life and Mr Maupin has in store for them next.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.