Write honourable politics

That the island teems with the political species and the relative antics is its blessing and its curse. Yet I will make an exception for Lino Spiteri. To have trudged one's way through 40 years of local politics, ferocious and petty as it is, and wind up at the end of it with a writing that addresses that intimate knowledge upfront, with due rigour and complexity, and still remain believable, is in itself an achievement.

Mr Spiteri's latest collection of 25 short stories, titled L-Onorevoli ? Stejjer li ktibt jien u g?addej fil-politika, is his fictional rendition of several experiences garnered through a lifetime of political involvement. It follows his collection of autobiographical stories, Jien u G?addej fil-Politika, published earlier last year. In a brief foreword to L-Onorevoli, the author insists that the title itself is not inspired by local parliamentarians, but rather by the common folks (nies ?g?ar) that people his stories. The latter, he insists, are the onorevoli throughout his work.

Mr Spiteri constructs his social narratives around mundane situations, vignettes and characters picked from everyday life and often expressed in a Dickensian slant. In Il-Ktieb ta' ?e?a, the eponymous protagonist expects her name to show up in the new telephone directory. When she cannot identify herself in the directory, she turns to her local parliamentary deputy who finds the entry and gives her his own copy, duping her into believing that he is presenting her with his privileged edition. Mr Spiteri's narrative method here reminds one of the "magic realist" techniques utilised by the likes of Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, wherein reality is touched with hints of enchantment and fantasy.

A purportedly dumb Cesare l-G?annej in Dfin fil-Mi?bla breaks into hysterical cries and acquires speech during the murder scene at a local staging of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The grotesque ?anpawl in Jum il-Ministru is a loquacious giant with piercing eyes who barges into the narrative as he harangues a growing-and-hungry minister in the hope of landing a government job. Again, ?anpawl, with limbs resembling prickly pear and carob trees, is a cross between Babur, the hulking allegory of common man in Salman Rushdie's Fury, and Dicken's Magwitch, between whose legs Pip Pirrip could see the countryside for miles around. The first-person narrator of Il-Kuntrattur is a thinly-veiled rendition of a local contractor grown to gargantuan proportions, who has to be admitted to the corridors of power. L-Azzarin and his way with firearms in the tragic Omm l-Azzarin illustrate the macabre measure to which political prerogatives in the past were ready to forfeit even human lives in the name of hollow partisan credos.

Mr Spiteri's prose has a quality of adaptability to and endorsement of contrasting, often conflicting, perspectives. It straddles different subjectivities and realms of experience: L-Onorevoli, after all, is also a proper name for the politician who has "made it", more often than not, through wile, guile and Machiavellian tact. Faced with L-Img?allem, the obscure political leader in F'Dell il-Muntanja, the young, idealistic newspaper editor outlines his ambivalent emotions towards the man. The youngster is disillusioned; the leader, immovable as a dark force in a Conradian drawing-room, is unaffected.

Throughout the book, the lives of the common man in the street and the high and mighty cross each other. The hoi polloi, the commoner, is attracted to, or constrained to identify with the politician and vice-versa, very often effecting one's self-annihilation into another whom he would rather exorcise than incorporate. Typically, however, the ignis fatuus, the misleading light that herds the uneducated towards calamity in these stories, is politics and its big men. As the deputy tells old ?e?a when he hands her the "magical" telephone directory with her name listed there, "[...] ara Nann, biex ma titfixkilx se nqeg?edlek ritratt tieg?i fil-ktieb. Meta trid issib lilek, kemm tfittex hawn biss fejn qieg?ed jien, imkien i?jed".

A number of stories, but particularly ?wie? fis-Sagristija, Dfin fil-Mi?bla and Qniepen u Mqades, extracted from Mr Spiteri's earlier novel Rivoluzzjoni, Do Minore, take on the stand-off between the Church and the Labour Party during the politically turbulent 1960s. Mr Spiteri's writing about the epoch in this volume, however, is best represented in Mikroskopju. This may well be the most outstanding piece in the collection. By means of dialogue, conversation and direct speech, Mr Spiteri recreates a scenario of idealistic, bohemian young artistes and budding writers killing time in what is presumably Pjazza Re?ina in Valletta, as they debate the establishment and its champions who stand in the vicinity. The story, with its interjecting unidentified narrative voices, explores the dynamics of political and cultural change. Who will bring it about, a "decadent" bourgeois youth or the political establishment? Mikroskopju is rich in vision and in cultural connotation. Through its poignant portrayal of another era, it achieves the signature effect of L-Onorevoli: a politically charged portrayal of community, unassumingly pitched, but enormously relevant to the realities we inhabit today.

• Mr Bugeja is a Doctoral Researcher and Commonwealth Scholar in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
• A review copy of this title was supplied by PEG Ltd.