Pamplona

25 April

The ferry docks on time. Thirty minutes later, I’m waved through immigration and heading east on the A8 towards Bayonne. There is a more direct route to Pamplona but it’s 08:30 and there is all day ahead of me. Critically, I’m on my own so can do as I please. I’ve recently read Ernest Hemingway’s first novel (many say his best…), ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and a convert to his simple, direct style. So this is a Hemingway day and to hell with what anyone thinks.

The taxi ride from Bayonne, through the Basque Country on the edge of the Pyrenees, to Pamplona is easily recognisable from the novel, a hundred years on. The customs office at Arnegúy is now unmanned but the fast-flowing stream still marks the border between France and Spain. The town of Burghete where his characters return to fish and drink is unchanged from that described. Only the vision of Pamplona, rising from the plain and the outstretched white road has been lost to low-rise, light-industrial sprawl.

But it’s Pamplona and more specifically, the Cafe Irynūa, that’s the principal attraction of Pamplona for me. It’s the epicentre of the novel and where the relationships between the principal characters disintegrate in a fug of failure, booze and sexual jealousy. It has been fastidiously preserved and is gloriously ornate and grand.

What is the attraction of the locations of film and fiction? Last year in Switzerland, the Schilthorn mountain with the revolving Piz Gloria restaurant have all-but turned into a theme park to celebrate a 50-year-old James Bond film. It must be a desire to get as close to where the magic happens that’s the draw, as I’m clearly not alone in making these train-spotterish pilgrimages.

Back to Hemingway and this novel that has cast such a long shadow. As a writer, he ‘divides opinion’ to put it politely in terms of style and content. But in Pamplona his name is everywhere. Predictably, there is a bust of him outside the  Plaza del Tores.  His assumed support for bull-fighting now makes him the anti-christ in many quarters and his blunt simple prose (he likened his style to an iceberg) is not sufficiently lyrical and lacks the verbal fireworks associated with writers of his reputation.

My take on the bullfighting scenes is he just described it rather well. The tradition and spectacle of it is the one-eighth of the iceberg. The remaining seven are the undercurrents of what constitutes bravery, masculinity and honour as the 19-year-old matador effortlessly secures the affections of the promiscuous, female, English aristocrat. In fairness, he is not up against particularly stiff competition (no pun intended) from the ensemble of drunken, distinctly third-rate humans that makes up the rest of Hemingway’s motley crew.