The author of a weighty tome on a 16th-century attempt to create a Utopia in Mexico might well expect to be exempt from Elmore Leonard’s advice to ‘leave out the parts readers tend to skip’. A book that runs to 60 pages of footnotes, bibliography and index might even be required to have such parts. But Toby Green’s tale of Vasco de Quiroga bills itself as ‘genre-defying’ and so we shall judge it accordingly.
The bits the reader is tempted to skip are — of course — the same bits that ‘defy’ easy categorisation by genre. What Green does is to tell a good and captivating story of great interest and resonance in the modern world. But he punctuates it with flights of fancy in which a semi-imaginary author converses semi-philosophically with a series of semi-grotesque characters in an attempt to demonstrate the ‘relevance’ of the subject (and therefore of the book) to the world we know today.
This is unfortunate. The story does not need this ‘hybrid of biography and utopian narrative’ and these passages — which take up perhaps one quarter of the text — spoil it in much the same way as golf ruins a good walk.
The walk itself is highly enjoyable and illuminating. Green begins his quest in Madrigal, where the Vasco de Quiroga is the third child of noble parents. We do not know his date of birth, but we know that his parents died young and that he was able, through connections and wealth, to pursue his studies in law. By the early 1520s he is a judge-in-residence in Oran, in what is now Algeria. He soon returns to Spain where he works on the fringes of the court of Charles and Isabella.
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