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.
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