Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson review – a magical homage to Catalonia

I want to admit that, although he has written a dozen novels and a memoir, all apparently much loved and acclaimed, I have somehow never read Rupert Thomson’s work until now. I feel it worth mentioning this because I’ve just had so agreeable a time with his latest, Barcelona Dreaming, was treated so courteously as a reader, relaxing into a sense of nonchalant mastery and narrative control, that I now have a lot of catching up to look forward to.

Thomson is one of those writers who bolted out of the national gates at the first chance he got, choosing to live in many different countries after he began writing in the 1980s. Barcelona Dreaming is his paean in three lightly connected novellas to the Catalan city he clearly knows – and loves – well. Early on, a middle-aged English narrator, Amy, sets the scene as she describes enjoying “the beach every weekend in the summer, the mountains in the winter – and restaurants and bars that stay open all night. It was a city whose pleasures were simple and constant.” She relishes the names of the metro stations, “so exotic and unpronounceable… Urquinaona, El Putxet, Llacuna, Gorg”.

The novel made me crave to be in some dreamy Barcelona neighbourhood, drinking afternoon cañas of beer and watching the life of the street, but there’s far more going on here than unbidden tourist promo. In terms of storytelling, there is no fat: all is lean, taut, propulsive. Insights are abundant, tenderly knowing, and Thomson displays a graceful ability to inhabit the responses and concerns of all sorts of characters. A young man warms to a gruff head waiter with “his leg that dragged and his growling voice, his kindness hidden underneath, like an embarrassing condition”.

All three sections are told in the first person and set early this century, on the eve of the global financial crash. The first, The Giant of Sarrià, recounts Amy’s sexually charged relationship with Abdel, a beautiful young Moroccan immigrant half her age. Their erotic obsession and the precariousness of Abdel’s undocumented life mean their feverish love story is bound to derail. Racism, exploitation and class divisions are profitably examined within 80 pages.

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In The King of Castelldefels, the narrator is ‘“Nacho” Cabrera, a booze-swilling jazz musician and haphazard businessman in his 60s. An affable, faintly sleazy bon vivant, Nacho enjoys the affections of his 39-year-old Brazilian girlfriend, Cristiani. In a calculated bid to endear himself to this attractive woman, Nacho starts bringing her adolescent son to his local bar on Saturday mornings and the pair cultivate a blokeish fandom for Barcelona FC. His father-figure act soon becomes the real thing. Meanwhile, the real-life Brazilian superstar Ronaldinho, who played for Barça between 2003 and 2008, befriends Nacho and asks him for help with his Spanish. In a winningly odd scene, “Ronnie” hangs out drinking caipirinhas at Nacho’s lacklustre pad while his host loses himself in an hours-long electric piano rendition of a composition by Keith Jarrett.

As Nacho’s memory begins to lapse and bizarre circumstances proliferate, the tale takes on a sheen of the surreal and the absurd, evoking the slanted fictive ambiences of Roberto Bolaño or Paul Auster. The hallucinogenic edge is intensified in the third and final section, The Carpenter of Montjuïc, with its Russian doll structure of nested narratives. Jordi, a literary translator, makes the acquaintance of a vaguely sinister London man named Vic Drago, though his name, like everything about him, becomes less certain as the tale unfolds.

Characters who are central in one story hover on the peripheries of another. Nacho’s ex-wife, Montse, and her professor husband are friends of Amy; Montse re-emerges to work on a translation project with Jordi in the final story – and so on. The effect is one of uncontrived urban community, the bustle and musical chairs of real life. Barcelona Dreaming is the next most pleasurable thing to passing a season in one of Europe’s most attractive cities and Thomson doesn’t put a foot wrong evoking its dramas and charms.

• Barcelona Dreaming by Rupert Thomson is published by Other Press (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply