Flamenco: Jason Webster's tale begins, as so many do, with the end of a relationship. While Webster mopes at the bar, a drunken busker suggests to him that he learn the guitar.
So, on a whim, Webster and his rudimentary musical skills book a one-way ticket to Spain in a quest to become a flamenco guitarist. A blond, pale-skinned boy from East Anglia trying to find his own soul in the dark centre of an art he knows only in the tourist-friendly version of castanets and yells of "Olé", Webster, we have learned quickly, is a man who lives on romantic notions.
He first encounters the titular duende in an Alicante square, where he is reduced to tears by the performance of a dancer, a fat woman screaming rather than singing, hardly moving on the stage, yet who "fills us, and the evening around us, with the sense of another space". It is this encounter which spurs him through the next couple of years, as he attempts to find in his own playing this duende, the ecstatic, emotional state that is the essence of flamenco.
He becomes the latest "guiri" marvelling at the passion and wildness that makes what Hemmingway called "the only country". Yet, the novelty of the subject and his flair for storytelling prevent the book from sliding too deep into cliché. Yes, there are bullfights and weddings and women who could cut you in half with a stare, and he has little of the clout of some of those writers who have gone before. But Webster, it turns out, has an exquisite nose for trouble, and it is the diversions on the road to flamenco that make such enjoyable reading.
In Alicante he engages in an affair with Lola, a second-rate dancer and Senora Robinson-type. In Madrid, he falls in with a gypsy band, and dives head first into the flamenco underground, fuelling the three gigs a night with a regular diet of cocaine and alcohol, and getting dragged in to one of the band's car-stealing activities.
All the while, he is becoming less and less certain he is searching for duende in the right places. He is so grateful to have fallen in with gypsies - the guardians of flamenco - that it takes him some time to realise that this is a mediocre troupe made up of journeymen and alcoholics. They play to the foreigners and the ignorant and use Webster's blonde hair and white fingers for their marketing value rather than any talent their owner might have. This section makes for the best of the book, when the creeping reality of his journey begins to usurp his naivety, and the scrapes he gets into give the book the trappings of a thriller.
"You want to know what duende is really about?" his gypsy mentor Carlos taunts him. "It's about this. It's about living on the edge - a tope. It's about singing so hard you can't speak any more. Or playing until your fingers bleed. It's about taking yourself as far as you can go and then going one step further." To Webster's credit, he is forever shaking off the banal and taking that step. It makes for great reading at times, even if the tone becomes cloying at times. He clings to the persona of a naïf, regularly swept along by a romance that blinds him to the seedy reality. Each major adventure is heralded by his summoning to some mysterious rendezvous. He gets into cars without asking where he's going. Arrives at places without asking why he's there.
Perhaps he prefers the mystery as a way of enhancing the narrative of his own life, or perhaps as a device to enhance that of the book.
Ironically, it is often a helpful approach. This story is propelled by plot rather than style. Webster is not naturally articulate, and when he falters he reaches for what are often nonsensical similes. The car thief, Jesus, moves "swiftly, like a shadow". He cruises past cars "like a hunter". Later, Webster describes a villa as having "a false man-made smell of a recently constructed building". It is a book riddled with clumsy sentences that threaten to topple the story. They never do, chiefly because the mix of romance and determination that propels Webster through life is more than enough to bring the reader along too. The duende may not be found in his writing, but his story more than makes up for it.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
Shane Hegarty