El rey recibe - Eduardo Mendoza

El rey recibe is the first of a trilogy where Mendoza blurs the line between autobiography and real life, playing it for humour. The protagonist is Rufo Batalla, young man starting out on a career in journalism in 1968 who gets his unexpected break covering a royal wedding for a small Catalan newspaper's society column. During the Franco years, the public's interest in royalty remains undiminished, with the coverage of Grace Kelly still memorable for its impact, not least in popular gossip magazines. This royal wedding doesn't seem quite as promising but, inevitably with one of Mendoza's protagonists, complications ensue as he runs into any number of eccentric characters.

Batalla doesn't get too far in his plans and hopes for furthering his career. After an encounter with a young woman the day before, he ends up being late for the wedding at a hotel in Mallorca, and when he does turn up he is bundled off to a room at the hotel by the minders. He might have missed the event, but he gains an exclusive interview with the Prince, ruler in exile from a Baltic state. He is also introduced o the Prince's spiritual advisor and in the process gains an awareness of viewing the world from something of a sideways perspective. He also discovers that the woman he encountered and took back to his room the day before is now married to the Prince.

Batalla's progress in the novel broadly follows the progress of Spain's gradual transformation from a dictatorship to the changing modern world an industry of tourism, which in Mendoza is always a subject for scorn and surrealism. With the relaxation of strict regulation in Spain, Batalla now has a curiosity about how rest of the world operates and a keen interest in Marxism take the narrator behind the Iron Curtain to get a real life view on the worldwide struggle against capitalism and oppression. These are years of profound social change; the Prague Spring, the death of Che Guevara and MLK, Vietnam, 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' and the student riots in Paris are all referenced.

In Part 2 of the book, Batalla has gone to see another side of the world in New York, seeking new horizons. He is an intern in the Civil Service Spanish Chamber of Commerce struggling to get by in the big city on low pay. In America during the fall-out from Watergate, Stonewall, 'The Godfather', he gains a different perspective on the social and political changes occurring at this time. He relates and considers the influential or opposing views of friends and others acquaintance's views on the world and, on a personal level, tries also to understand what he wants and expects from his romantic affairs. 

Spain, Barcelona, Franco and family remain a constant in Mendoza's books and they are central to El rey recibe, as does the inescapable realities of figuring out how to deal with the basics of living. El rey recibe comes across as a little more naive than most of Mendoza's books that deal with these subjects - even though that is also part of the author's style - but it's also a little disjointed and lacking in focus or direction. As part of a trilogy however, it remains to see whether this venture extends into something greater.