Not so with Norman Lewis. It is the wonderful writing that makes it inevitable that we are drawn completely into the world he describes. How can such simplicity of style produce such colour and tone? How can he be at once at arm's length and yet entirely immersed in the world he describes? It makes for sublime and delicate description. Lewis is present but barely so. This in itself is a major difference from today's solipsistic potboilers. The world he sees is what he writes about: he himself does not "do" anything. He does not rebuild a farm, buy a tractor, hire a plumber... Those that he finds there are the principle characters: he does not take the stage himself.

He writes about a Spain that was virtually mediaeval, even after WW2. Now a 14 hour run from Calais by car or 2 hours by no-frills airline, this community were then living "behind God's back". Tourism was as far as Franco was prepared to unbend: a few thousand foreigners for three or four weeks on an otherwise useless stretch of coast and the Guardi Civil to arrest anyone in a bikini ....

On all sides, the world was rushing forward into the material world of the second half of the 20thC. In Spain everything was stultified or going backwards. Lewis witnessed a world that placed burning wreathes around the necks of cattle to celebrate a saint's day, where superstition and the Catholic Church combined to create a potent medicine that made this community sick with despair and resignation and yet change was beyond them. The result we know now, that all this was swept away, is so very gently intimated by Lewis, not taking advantage of hindsight but letting the subtle shifts of alignment between the local don and some monied chancer trace the outlines of what would later be the ruin of these people's old lives.

There are memorable characters in this book. Norman Lewis is not one of them - which is how he wished it. The place and the people and the time of their lives; this is what he set out to show us and the picture is rich and clear and profound.