Review: Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia

Ten years and a couple more best-sellers on, it’s probably about time to have another look at it. In a nutshell: sheep-farmer and listless travel writer Chris Stewart decamps to Andalusia, where he buys a farm in the Alpujarras. Here, he settles down into a series of pleasingly low-key adventures with an assembled cast of locals and New Ager expats.

Beyond that skeleton synopsis, there are a few things that Driving Over Lemons isn’t: it’s not a travel book. Stewart arrives and settles. It’s an expat story; a tale of day-to-day life in a (slightly) strange and foreign land. The book’s sub-heading is An Optimist in Andalucia, and it’s very much a tale of the possibilities for reinvention and of looking at life in a different light.

Crucially, unlike another famous spinner of the expat yarn, Peter Mayle, (who in A Year in Provence always gives the impression that he’s struggling to uphold his stiff upper-lipped Englishness in the face of a load of intolerable rustics) Stewart is a humble, interested guest. And that’s the real secret of the book’s success: it’s absolutely impossible not to like its central protagonist.

Driving Over Lemons is a very ‘unliterary’ book. And it’s a lot better for it. While Stewart is certainly many things, he’s not Richard Ford or Gerald Brenan. Nor does he try to be. There’s no ‘big message’ here, no crucial cultural investigation. His writing is natural; a personal story told in personal terms.

That’s not to say that Stewart can’t knock out a nice line. To this day, I can remember quite clearly being caught up in his description of “walking with the water” – attending to his acequias and watering his terraces. My consequent, long-standing fascination with the Roman/Moorish irrigation channels that riddle the landscape was sparked by those passages.

The book rollicks along in a series of enjoyable anecdotes, and in its simple, clear descriptions of life on and around the farm, it captures some of the poetry, mystery and grandeur of the Andalusian landscape. A love of the region shines through in every word: a love of its nature, food and rituals of life.

But most of all, Stewart shows a love of its inhabitants and their idiosyncrasies. This is captured in countless exchanges – such as one with the disreputable Pedro about the name of a horse (“What’s it called?” “Brown” “Brown?” “Brown. It’s a brown horse.”)

He tells a wonderful story about digging out a track to his inaccessible farm: having discussed at length the right tools for the job, his friend and neighbour Domingo inexplicably plumps for precisely the sort of new digger/cocky operator combo they’d ruled against – with predictable results. (The digger topples over.)

Whether it’s these sort of well-observed incidents, or the making of papas a lo pobre, humdrum discussions about the “neighbours and boundaries and water and rates and rights”, or accounts of matanzas, sheep markets and long, wine-soaked conversations in village bars, so much of what’s so wonderful about rural Andalusia shines through in the writing.

Changing Andalusia

Ultimately, reading back over Driving Over Lemons also provides an interesting insight into what’s happened to Andalusia since the book was written. The donkeys are more seldom seen, and many smallholding farmers have sold off land to developers and other property-seeking expats (making themselves a bit richer, and the landscape a bit poorer in the process). But these are just inevitable shifts in the fabric of life in the region. Ten years on from when Driving Over Lemons was first published (and well over a million copies later) Andalusia is still here, pretty much as it always has been. As are Chris Stewart and his family.