My Weekly Book

Further Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin

It’s the eighties, the dawn of a brand-new decade for our friends at 28 Barbary Lane. And, to my initial dismay, much of the innocence of the seventies has already flown. Ronald Reagan is all but in the White House and Mona, always in the vanguard of the advancing zeitgeist, has forsaken San Francisco for Seattle never to appear more in this tale. Mary Ann has exchanged her yellow walls and wicker furniture for gun-metal grey carpeting and industrial shelving and her job as a secretary for a power-suited television career. Michael also has a most unlikely steady job, and his walls are no longer eggplant-coloured, a demonstration of domestic changes that were clearly inevitable at the end of the last novel, but which are nonetheless sad to see realised - one of the things that made me put off starting to read this book. Brian is having doubts on an existential scale about his career as a waiter and is feeling the need for a power suit of his own, even if it means going back to practising the law. Only Mrs Madrigal remains more or less unscathed, still with a lush cannabis patch in the back yard and a fine line in silk kimonos and scarlet azaleas. “I’m a cranky old hen,” she tells one of her surrogate children. “I like all my eggs in one basket.” And she works very hard throughout this story to bring this situation about.

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When we find something we like, we often hope it will go on for ever. But it’s a sad fact that stories, or film sequels, or television shows that actually do this soon lose all their creative fire and become sad parodies of their former selves. So I am delighted to report that Armistead Maupin rises wonderfully to the challenge of a both a new decade and a new instalment of his story. His characters are now thirty-somethings with a different set of values and preoccupations. But this doesn’t make them any less engaging or endearing – rather the opposite. We might think of this series as domestic and conversational but, in reality, he’s never been afraid of big, dramatic stories and this one is his most audacious yet, taking current affairs of a fairly recent vintage and rewriting them with his characters as part of the sequence of events. This could misfire horribly, and some readers may be less than convinced. Personally, I thought it worked a treat. As well as our Barbary Lane friends and the surviving members of the Halcyon family, we meet a few new faces in Further Tales of the City - once again, a welcome hot top on our coffee. There’s Prue Giroux, the arriviste society columnist who’s just a simple country gal from Grass County, Father Paddy Starr, the peculiarly San Franciscan Catholic priest and Bill Rivera, the Latino cop with shockingly bad taste and a penchant for Abba and Air Supply. We even get to catch up with old friends like D’orothea.

All in all, the series appears in fine form and manages to rise above ‘just another sequel’ into what is actually one of the most satisfying instalments so far. I feel optimistic about its future as I set out to read Babycakes.

One tip, though, especially if you’ve got the classic Black Swan edition, the one with the montage-style cover. DO NOT READ THE BACK OF THE JACKET before you’ve read the book. It’s got more spoilers than a sports car convention in Spoilersville, Spoiler County. And these are things you really don’t want to know about in advance. Trust me. It’s not pretty. Avert your eyes, already.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:32 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.