I so thoroughly enjoyed Robert Wilson's "A Small Death in Lisbon" and "The Company of Strangers" that I couldn't wait to get into this one. To call it a disppointment is not just putting it mildly, it's giving the book far more credit than it possibly deserves. This is a mean-spirited, small-hearted, oppressive book from start to finish.

That Wilson writes superbly only makes matters worse: from the sickening opening sequence to the end, it is a book of unleavened savagery, brutality and torture. For Wilson, sex and childhood are both utterly traumatic — I don't recall a single passage in the book of two people enjoying sex or of anyone having had a normal, stable, happy childhood. Wilson attempts to makes his protagonist, Inspector Jefe Javier Falçon, a troubled, complex (read human) man but only succeeds in making him look, by turns, sophomoric, petulant, maudlin, self-pitying and self-indulgent - an utterly loathsome person. He says things that are supposed to sound profound — at his least the other characters appear to think so — but when you read the line again you realize that more often than not he's only stating the obvious but cleverly contriving not to put it into any context, thus giving it an aura of depth it doesn't deserve.

About half-way through the book, the reader is suddenly plunged into diaries of our hero's father who is even worse than his son: charlatan, murderer, philanderer, pederast, this man, Francisco Falçon is supposed to have indulged in every depravity known to man and more. You wonder, at first, whether this is going anywhere or if this is just another novel that somehow meandered into this one. There's a little postscript by Wilson at the end where he says that he sat down and wrote out these journals over three months, but only some of them have been included, the rest being irrelevant, but are made available on the publisher's website. Actually, the whole of it is totally irrelevant and hampers the story, such as it is.

At some point, Wilson goes into his Hemingway routine with a needlessly bloody description of a bullfight; the bull wins this round. Seemingly endless, the book certainly seems to lose its way; we plough on and then Wilson rushes into an absurd and thoroughly unsatisfactory conclusion that is so contrived it's actually laughable and evidently written with one eye firmly aimed at Hollywood.

But perhaps the most irritating thing about the book is that a good quarter of it isn't in English at all. Wilson peppers every line, or every other line, with some wildly esoteric Spanish phrase, and not just names of places: there are medical terms, legal terms, forensic terms, type of coffee, the works. You need a phrasebook and sooner or later you tire of guessing what the heck he's talking about and just skip ahead, feeling cheated and increasingly angry. All this foreign-phrase-dropping adds zip to atmosphere, if that's what was intended, but a considerable amount to the reader's discomfort and annoyance. Apart from anything else, it seems to show a complete lack of concern and respect for the reader. We understand that it's set in Seville, but it's supposed to be written in English isn't it? Or did Wilson miss that?