My discussion has already given an indication of the extent to which the religious culture that surrounded Marsé in his early years provided him with a source of potent stories and images that greatly enrich his narratives as well as fuelling his critique of Catholicism in post-war Spain and Catalonia. One religious myth in particular needs further exploration, because it underpins so much post-war rhetoric, because it surfaces repeatedly in Marsé’s novels, and because it is an endless source of controversial imagery and ideas that he playfully exploits with knowledge and inventiveness. Linked in Chapters 2 and 3 with the Catholic doctrine of the Fall and National Catholic ideology, it is the myth of the Paradise Garden. However, Marsé goes beyond the Garden of Eden and the Fall in Genesis. Indeed, he uses two Gardens of Earthly Delights – one from the Song of Solomon, and one from the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Apocryphal Book of Daniel, each of which I shall introduce briefly when their relevance to individual novels becomes apparent – in which to set his reworkings of Eden within a wider context of sensual pleasure and call attention to the imaginative creativity of the narrator. The result is a complex shifting of narrative perspective that moves constantly between a pre-lapsarian paradise naivety and a post-lapsarian knowing critical awareness: ‘Los sueños juveniles se corrompen en boca de los adultos’ are the opening words of El embrujo de Shanghai (1993). With an adult awareness, the paradise gardens in Marsé’s earlier novels are defined socially and politically as the preserve of a wealthy elite in a wickedly sharp critique of Catalan Catholic nationalism; later, however, eroticised Edens are released from such narrow specificity and are claimed by Marsé as the imaginative inheritance even of children and of such hybrids as himself.

Gardens, both literal and symbolic, are a vivid element in Marsé’s detailed mapping of Barcelona, viewed through the often desiring and always suspect eyes of the venial author and his narrators. Gardens represent land and possession, leisure and pleasure, inclusion and exclusion, and as part of the urban landscape they can be read as a significant element in a social and economic representation of the post-war city.