One of the most interesting places to visit if you are ever in California is Monterey Bay. Today it is an affluent tourist haven, the home to celebrities like Brad Pitt and Clint Eastwood and an ideal stretch of coast to spot whales, play golf, browse art galleries and devour expensive haut cuisine meals. The hub of the sardine industry known as Cannery Row no longer exists, the wooden ramshackle sheds having been long since replaced by condos and hotels. The neighbourhood above Cannery Row is still called Tortilla Flat but has become thoroughly gentrified. It offers steeply descending residential streets and glorious views across the ocean. All signs of poverty and panhandling paisanos have been banished.

The novel published in 1935 was Steinbeck’s first commercial success. Critics argue that its popularity derived from the way the story offered lighthearted, humorous escapism for readers struggling through the Great Depression. It presented a romanticized, idyllic, and carefree life of paisanos, characterized by friendship, wine, and minimal material needs, they say—which stood in contrast to the era’s financial hardships. I don’t wholly agree. The period between 1920 and 1933 during which the narrative is set was plagued by ultra conservative prohibition laws and significant anti-immigration sentiments. In that Tortilla Flat is a ghetto for multiple variants of ethnic groups, most of whom cannot survive their penury without the solace of alcohol, Steinbeck seems to be asking pertinent, even subversive questions about the nature and consequences of social inequality and economic migration.

The word paisano does not have a straightforward equivalent in today’s English. He is a mixture of Spanish, Mexican, Indian and various Caucasian bloods, the author tells us, sunburned in colour and prickly defensive by nature. Danny and his friends are veterans of the first world war, living on the fringes of society, disregarding traditional, capitalist, and conventional social norms, immediately recognisable as bums or parasites, by turns cunning and opportunistic but their foibles are recognisably human and contradictory and often backfire on them – so the reader finds it easy to laugh and sympathize with their situation – at least I did. If television had been around at the time no doubt this material would have been translated into an award winning soap opera of the socially marginalized, not unlike Boys From The Blackstuff.

Each chapter presents a self-contained story. Danny inherits not one but two houses on the Flats. His philosophy is summed up when he rents one of them to Pilon – “Pilon, I swear what I have is thine. While I have a house, thou hast a house. Give me a drink.” The rent of course is never paid and Pilon sublets part of it to Pablo. Neglect, forgetfulness, debauchery, swindling, fighting and dypsomania are an innate way of life to these men. The rented second house is burnt down and Danny finds himself pretty soon inundated with freeloading lodgers. Liberty is extravagantly taken with his hospitality and Danny’s only insistence is that his sole bed remains out of bounds to everyone except himself. The episodic adventures of this dissolute gang, the idiosyncratic characters with whom they have social or carnal intercourse are introduced thick and fast. There’s Mr Torrelli, the bootlegging all purpose cuckholded grocer; the secretive pirate with his wheelbarrow, five dogs and buried treasure trove; Sweets Ramirez “her face hard and sharp as a hatchet, her figure lumpy and intentions selfish” who “dreamed of being Danny’s lady as did every other female on Tortilla Flat” now that he had become propertied.

There is a strong sense that Steinbeck drew all these characters from real life. He knew and loved them, despite their compulsive lassitude and deviancy. Just like King Arthur’s knights they are complex flawed heroes, capable of undertaking dangerous chivalrous tasks and spiteful self-serving ones by turn. I particularly liked the story about the vacuum cleaner that turns out to have no motor inside and the one in which the pirate persuades Danny and his pals to look after his bag of money after they have spent months trying to rob him of it. Religion and mystical experience both have a part to play in these tales. The pirate’s dogs, for instance, seem to experience a collective vision of St Francis and whatever casual contempt these congenial rogues may have for the materially hardworking and affluent in the community, they all properly respect the Catholic church, its icons and priests. I found the final chapters moving, hilarious and elegiac by turns. Danny’s decline into a state of melancholia is never explained. He disappears from the house for weeks and when he is finally found his relieved friends go to work cutting up squid at the canneries, generally reckoned to be the most unsavoury job in the world, to raise sufficient money to stage a grand 30 gallons of wine and keg of potato whisky party for him. But Danny loses it. In a fit of drunken psychotic rage he threatens all his guests with a pine table leg. “Who will fight?” he yells. “Am I alone in the world? Will no-one fight with me?” But nobody responds and out he goes, waving his ludicrous weapon like Sir Launcelot, in search of an enemy “who is worthy of Danny”, only to be found later at the bottom of the gulch, mortally wounded in a fictional combat.

It is a crazy conclusion to a crazy series of events but yet more is to come. The grieving friends gather for the funeral, ashamed that their wretched ragged clothing does not match the occasion, swapping stories of Danny’s goodness, his courage and piety. They watch the ceremony from a distance, unable to stand their shame and misery. On the way back home they steal two gallons of wine from Torrelli’s with which they drown their sorrows while singing mournful songs. When a discarded cigar stub starts a fire nobody can be bothered to extinguish it and the idea takes hold that “this symbol of holy friendship, this good house of parties and fights, of love and comfort, should die as Danny died, in one last glorious assault on the gods.” And so the place burns to the ground. But just when we are persuaded to think this yarn will end on an heroic note of genuine chivalric sacrifice, Steinbeck cuts it off at the knees by adding as an ironic aside that “Pilon, who profited by every lesson, took what was left of the wine with him.”

I don’t think I’ve ever read a better book about male bonding. Perfectly paced, a laugh out loud, socially intelligent and subversive entertainment that made me feel nostalgic for my ramshackle university days and, above all, that very rare thing in the canon of western literature – a masterpiece of proletarian fiction.

FIVE STARS