To the manor reborn… a fresh tale of the city
Mona of the Manor by Armistead Maupin Doubleday, £20
OFF THE SHELF: BOOK REVIEW
Have you ever visited San Francisco and gone in search of a certain address, just in case it might turn out to be real? Were you trying to find the fictional 28 Barbary Lane, because you couldn’t stop yourself? If so, this book is for you.
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series aroused fanatical devotion: for 10 years and six books we followed the inhabitants of landlady Anna Madrigal’s rooming house on Russian Hill – Michael Tolliver, Mary Anne Singleton, Mona and Brian – on their transgressive and transformative life journeys. Book number six, Sure of You, came out in 1989 and was meant to end the story. Maupin waited nearly 20 years before starting up again, and has produced (slowly) another three books in the series, each of which we were told would be the last.
The most recent was The Days of Anna Madrigal in 2014. And now we have book number 10, Mona of the Manor. Mona Ramsay, Michael’s best friend, ended up in England in Babycakes (book four), having married an
English Lord for complex reasons. At the risk of spoilers: Mona did not feature much in the series after that, and disappeared completely from the later books. So this one is going back in time – up till now all the books have been roughly contemporaneous with their publication date, but this is set firmly in the past, 1994, and thus somewhere between book six (Sure of You, 1989) and book seven (Michael Tolliver Lives, 2007).
Mona and her adopted son Wilfred are offering bed and breakfast in their manor house in the Cotswolds, and get involved in the lives of a very traditional, and surprised, American couple: “You thought you were getting a Barbara Cartland novel and ended up with a house full of mouse **** and queers”, as Mona says to her guest Rhonda. Airbnb and customer reviews definitely haven’t happened yet: the house is chaotic and so are the lives of the gay owners; guests Ernie and Rhonda are conservative and right wing. It turns out that Ernie is abusive to Rhonda. In the Maupin tradition of wildly eventful plot lines, Mona and Wilfred “rescue” Rhonda within around 48 hours, and start teaching her a better way to live. They think they have got rid of Ernie, but they haven’t.
Truthfully, Mona of the Manor will be mystifying if you haven’t read the other books, but fans will enjoy it in a rather melancholic way, like getting a Christmas circular letter from some people you used to know. It is set entirely in England: San Francisco and Barbary Lane don’t feature at all – though, thank goodness, Mona’s “mother” Anna, and best friend Michael, do come on a trip to join in some midsummer activities where the plotlines will converge.
These books started as a newspaper serial: short, punchy chapters that ended on cliffhangers and swapped between the characters’ points of view. Mona of the Manor fits right in. There are unabashed sex scenes, and smart talk, and people still use the signature endearment: Babycakes. Maupin’s fictional world has always encompassed a relaxed attitude to lawbreaking when the author considers it morally justified, up to and including violent death, and the tradition continues here.
Maupin has often stated his key belief: that you can ditch the blood ties of the “biological family” and choose instead a “logical family”. He has been clear that this is as true in his own life as in his fiction, and the message still shines out: find the people who love and understand you, and stick with them.