THE MAN WITH NO SHADOW

This is Ricardo Diaz, probably Spain's greatest living if retired matador, who becomes involved, via blackmail in an attempted assassination of Franco. It is rather incomprehensibly planned (for El Caudillo is already dying of a stroke) by Jesus Quintana, who takes pleasure in a ""clean"" killing. Meanwhile Diaz is preparing his younger son Juan Carlos for his first bullfight in Torremolinos where dumb tourists flock in increasing numbers every year to catch, the festival and the sun, where Juan Carlos gets his first goring, where Franco eludes his fate and Ricardo meets his: giving his finest, and final, display of the cape before more or less purposefully getting caught on the huge horns of a Miura bull. Despite plot incongruities and an overdose of name-dropping (Richard and Elizabeth, Afl and Jackie) this is as engrossing a novel as the bullfighting it describes so well and a good presentation of the endless contradictions of a once-bitterly divided country patching up its wounds.