I'm happy to say that I have so far managed to keep to my 2026 goal of reading at least one Gibraltarian book a month. To say this at the end of February is already quite an achievement as my New Year resolutions usually don't make it past the third week of the January.
February 2026 was one of the stormiest I have every experienced, in Gibraltar or elsewhere in the world. I spent much of the month mopping up water that was being driven through the windows or the frames or whatever hairline fissure could be found in the building facade and ponding in my living room, and making sure my books did not suffer any water damage. So it was a relief to be able to disappear into a book in the evenings, since I had no remote inclination to venture outdoors for anything much (milk and tea bags excepted).
So I got stuck into Terence Moss' Man in the Mist, the first of the Levanter Trilogy. I've met Terence. He struck me as a quiet, intelligent and unassuming man and passionate about the storylines and characters that were pouring from him, inhabiting his imagination and demanding to be let out on paper. I was delighted when he started publishing the series, albeit it took me ages to get round to reading them (I've only read Man in the Mist so far and am lining up the others).
I wanted to read this book for several reasons. I tend to bang on about Gibraltarian literature and how important it is for the canon of our literature to grow and evolve, so the least I can do, since I talk the talk, is to walk the walk and read as much of it as I can: books are written to be read and if we, in Gibraltar, want our writers to write, we need to read their work, and talk about it and encourage others to read it. In turn, writers have a duty to keep writing and to write the best book or story or poem they can, every time they write.
I was also really keen to see how this genre blend would work: a combination of fantasy and social history bordering on memoir. I also wanted to see how the idea of the levanter cloud being a time travel portal would pan out and how this worked as a device to then write fiction based on historical reality and depict the Gibraltar of the past. Anyone that's been caught in a lung-cloying August levanter cloud on an August afternoon would tell you it feels you have been transported into some distant chamber of hell, let alone travelled into a fantasy portal! And would he create a vision of a Gibraltar of the future? At the outset, I had no idea and I was intrigued.
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| The Mist |
I think it must be really hard to write a genre blend novel. These are becoming increasingly more popular, with the uptake in things like cozy crime mysteries set in various parts of the past, with Mary Chiappe and Sam Benady's Bresciano mysteries being a local example, and romantacy, a blend of romance and fantasy being hugely popular internationally, and with Katarina Martinez (pen name for Gibraltarian writer, Lee Sampere) also being a local example, and hugely commercially successful to boot. What strikes me, though, as a writer, is that this is technically difficult. You are trying to write two different genres, each of which has its own conventions, structures and reader expectations, and you are always risking focusing too much on one leaving the aficionados of the other a little bit disappointed. I have huge respect for writers who attempt this and even greater respect for those who pull it off.
Moss has unquestionably carried out a huge amount of research into Gibraltar's history and delved into his personal family archives as well as into his own memories and experiences. With Man in the Mist, he has been able to use the time travel device to portray a Gibraltar of the 1960s, a Gibraltar of the patios, of the working people getting through day to day life as well as of the political and social changes of the time. I remember the 1960s myself, and I found many of Moss' characters readily recognisable, as well as having at least anecdotal familiarity of some of the events that he mentions.
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| Gibraltar in 1960 - not sure who to credit for the image |
I was impressed at the level of detail that is included in the depictions of day to day living in the patios, family life, local traditions such as the annual trips to La Almoraima, and what life was like in the local workplace. Moss doesn't shy away from telling it as it was, even in terms of showing the blatant racism that existed in Gibraltar in that time, particularly towards the Spanish, or describing the smuggling that took place daily as Spanish workers supplemented their meagre existence with goods that could only be bought in Gibraltar. He also gives a good discussion on the fate of the refugees from the Spanish Civil War and does not gloss over some of the uglier things that happened, which I really like. For me, literature sheds a light and shines a mirror on society or on history, it is a panacea for the intentional obfuscation by the establishment. The writing does on occasion drift close to nostalgic, although this is partly driven by the fact that the protagonist is using the ability to travel through time to indulge his own nostalgia and revisit his family's home to get to know his own past better, but I thought that some of the passages where events take place in 1960s Gibraltar are some of the best ones in the book: absorbing, enlightening, and generally helping to take the plot forward.
I say 'generally helping' because from time to time I felt that the lingering in the past distracted me from the main storyline, which was the mystery that was developing in the fantasy world that Moss was creating parallel to this. The pitfalls of writing time travel is that tenses can get confused. On occasion I found myself having to reread passages of the book so that I could follow what was happening. This interrupted the flow of my reading which was a bit frustrating, but what I did notice was that it happened less frequently as the novel developed so either the author's skills developed or my understanding improved, or a combination of the two. It was also tempered by the interest that I had in the concept of being able to revisit your childhood as an adult, and I think this novel explored hindsight and how this works, as well as how lessons might be learned from contemplating the past.
Something else that I found interrupted the flow of the story for me, was that occasionally there was an indulgence in describing the protagonist's feelings or in over-explaining what was happening - too much telling and not enough showing which resulted in a slowing down of the story. I would have preferred a few well-chosen active words that allowed my imagination to fill in the details of the character's emotional response to a situation.
On the whole, however, the events of the story, even though it's a fantasy novel, were realistic. This is important. Fiction requires the reader to suspend belief temporarily and this is particularly true of fantasy fiction. The key, I think, is to focus on the 'humanity' of the characters - because when we read stories, even if the main character is a robot or a fish, we read about the human condition, about emotions, about universal truths - and I think Moss achieves this well. In fact, although as a point of personal preference, I would have liked a better balance between the fantasy and the history, because I felt I wanted to read more of the former, the fantasy storyline was intriguing, introducing a mystery that is set to thread through the trilogy. This was important because otherwise the book would have read as a pseudo-memoir, but Moss keeps his head and weaves the two narratives quite well together. It certainly left me wanting to pick up Book 2: The Girl in the Mist.
Finally, I want to quote a line from the book which left me pondering how important it is to learn from the past:
"Travelling through the Mist had enabled me to see how life had changed over the years. How progress did not always mean that life will be better. I had certainly found that life in the Fifties was simpler and more humane. If I could somehow take that message back, then maybe I could improve the quality of life in the present."
And later, as a reminder that all you can alter is the future by learning from the past, he adds:
"Time is intransigent, it won't let you change anything!"
Food for thought.
Man in the Mist is definitely worth a read, especially if you want to know what Moss thinks might be a Gibraltar of the future - he manages to integrate this and it is not as far-fetched as you might think. Terence Moss undertook a hard challenge and has devised some really clever ways of weaving the genres together, create a lead-in to a sequel, build up a complex mystery while also creating a realistic depiction of Gibraltar's recent past. I've linked to the Amazon version below, mainly because I haven't seen it in the local bookshops and would encourage you to pick up a copy.
Man in the Mist by Terence Moss
