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If you’ve been a regular Your Next Book reader for a while you must have noticed that I like to spotlight books by lesser known authors as well as commenting on well-publicised works. About a year ago I wrote about Patricia Román’s Letters from the Mountains set in Andalusia.

 

The Cuckoo and the Cuckquean is Patricia’s latest novel.

 

Let’s start with the title, since that probably has you wondering.

 

A European cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and leaves the young to be raised by the duped bird. The infant cuckoo forces its hosts young out of the nest. All this while the duped bird feeds and protects the intruder. These cuckoos have a distinctive call, ( cu…kooo) first heard in the Spring when the birds return from wintering further south.

 

A cuckquean, is the female counterpart to a cuckold. So, as a cuckold is a man whose wife is unfaithful, a cuckqueen is a woman whose husband is unfaithful. Historically a cuckold has been regarded as an object of scorn. Cuckolds and cuckolding feature in a number of Shakespeare’s plays.

 

The story begins in a small town near to Valencia in southern Spain in 1914, and in the middle of an argument. Maria won’t let ‘that bitch’ into her house. Catalina yells that it’s her house. Pedro, offstage, has made up his mind. The ‘bitch’ acquires a name: Rosa.

 

Then narrative switches abruptly away from anger and desperation to lyrical prose, and Rosa:

 

‘They had met in the limbo of the estuary, where a river meandered through the marshlands, dispersing across the mud-laden landscape until it reached the sea. Rosa had been watching the long-legged wader birds paddling across the wetland, and gulls in carefree flight gliding over the salt flats towards an endless horizon that promised her the world. Wading through the waterlilies, looking for eggs from the white-headed ducks that nested in the bulrushes, she’d looked up and seen him riding towards her on his pack-horse, weighed down by saddle-bags of salt.’

 

What happens next is entirely predictable. The man with the power, and the horse, captures the heart of the young girl and sets her up in a shack, near the river and well away from his family home. Rosa falls pregnant.

 

And then the truly surprising twist from Pedro: “Rosa, I’ve decided. You will give birth in my family house.”

 

And because he is the man, and even though he doesn’t own the house, three women suffer through the bizarre situation of Pedro’s mistress giving birth with his wife and mother in attendance. Pedro is in the bar but his mother, Catalina, arranged a university trained midwife to assist at the birth. Maybe Catalina arranged the entire bizarre event. She is woman who wields whatever power she can.

 

The contrast between the presence of the trained professional midwife and the bed of straw and a moth-eaten blanket that Rosa lies on epitomises the society around them. Spain in 1914 saw the same scientific strides as the rest of Europe but vast swathes of its population lived in shacks where they survived by washing clothes in water from the nearby river and eating vegetables grown on the plots by their shacks. They survived slightly better if they had a man they accommodated. This tension informs the rest of the book and the life of Lili, the child born that day.

 

There is one more character to introduce: Pepa Garcia. Pepa is from a wealthy family. She is educated. She travels around Spain organising women to fight for the vote. She knows Clara Campoamor, Spain’s most famous woman suffragist. Catalina invites Pepa to her house, much to Maria’s annoyance.

 

Patricia Román’s sympathy for her characters allows the reader to get close to people who might otherwise seem merely strange. All four women have serious quirks. Catalina is excoriatingly scornful, Pepa is aristocratically naive, Rosa is romantically pathetic and Maria? Well this sums up Maria:

 

‘Maria picked up her embroidery and stabbed the needle through the cloth.’

 

The cuckoo in the nest grows up to be Lili. After Rosa’s death she lives in Catalina and Maria’s house. Another surprising twist. Lily is also growing up in the era in which these women are realising, some faster than others, that if they want autonomy they are going to have to work for it. And eventually fight for it.

 

This is a deeply shocking story on many levels. The plot itself is decidedly unnerving. The psychological strain on Rosa, Maria and Lily leaps off the page. The power invested in men reminds the reader of The Handmaid’s Tale. But this is not dystopian fantasy. This is Spain a hundred years ago. The depths of poverty, the hard scrabble life of even those with land and housing, like Catalina’s family, is hard to imagine. But you will imagine it because Patricia Román is so good at leading you there in clear, simple language.

 

This is Lili, now twelve years old:

 

‘I went outside to sweep the doorstep. The newspaper man was leaning against a lamppost eating his sandwich and drinking a beer. I sighed, knowing I would have to clear up his mess, and when he looked up, I turned away because Catalina had told me not to talk to the press.’

 

There’s so much in those three lines. Lili lives like a maid in the household. This newspaper man is going to be significant. Yet he is like all the other entitled men; he will leave his mess for a woman to clear up. Lili is friendly by nature but respects Catalina’s wishes.

 

There’s more to come that’s shocking but I won’t give it all away.

 

If you want to give a chance to an author who might never cross your radar, if you want to get close to another time and place or if you are interested in how women’s fight to be recognised as fully human took place somewhere other than the USA or the UK, then The Cuckold and the Cuckquean is for you.

 

And, by the way, that fight had not ended when women won the right to vote in Spain in 1931 and first voted in 1933. In 1939 Franco’s government suspended all democratic national elections. They were not restored until 1977. History is not a mechanical progression towards justice.

 

 

 

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