This book is something I hadn't realised I was actually waiting for, but once I started reading it, I was there and I knew. Spain post-Civil-War, at the beginning of World War II. One of the places and times I would definitely choose, given that time-machine. But C.J.Sansom does it for us.
Winter in Madrid. Not many people (other than Spaniards, naturalmente) have spent a winter in Spain. I have. I worked as a teacher there in the mid-60s. And that is so much closer to the events described in this book than to where we are now. It is almost like discussing a novel set in Spain in the 1340s and saying I was there in the 1360s. Most of the people I met (I was teaching adults much of the time) remembered the Civil War, many had taken part in it, all were passionately pro- or anti-Franco, El Caudillo, Spain's equivalent of Der Fuhrer or Il Duce and the only one still alive and dictating. Those who were anti, of course, (which was most people in Cartagena, where I spent the winter) were afraid to say so, at least in public. But the extraordinary thing was that everybody assumed I agreed with them. Cartagena is an important naval port and, as the last city to fall to Franco, was heavily garrisoned. It is also, or was then, the home of a major ship-building industry. I taught naval officers, all Francoists; it never occurred to them that I might not be. I taught marine engineers in the ship-building yard (I had to cross the port in a small boat every day to get to it) who all detested Franco and the Falange; they too assumed I agreed with them. One of the things a language teacher has to do (it is not all grammar and exercises!) is get the students talking. And this was like taking the plug out. (Imagine teaching separate classes of Inquisitors and Cathars in 13th-century Carcassonne!) I had heart-rending descriptions not only of the blockade of Cartagena and the bombing of the city and docks (there were government ships holding out in Cartagena long after Madrid had fallen) but even eye-witness accounts of the fall of Madrid – as described in this book – and of the bombing of the firest and the forest fire at Guernica.
So you see, I opened the door of the time-machine very ready and willing; Sansom did not disappoint me. I lived through those terrible times with Bernie, the International Brigader; Harry, the linguist invalided out of the army after Dunkirk and sent to Madrid as an Embassy interpreter; Barbara, the Red Cross nurse; Sofia, who before Franco had been a medical student, and now was trying to keep her mother and brother by working in a dairy ... If I start quoting, we will be here all night. So I will simply say that the main story-line is Barbara's search for her great love, Bernie, missing in action and presumed dead, but now known to be alive and held illegally in one of Franco's concentration camps.
I might point out that this is the C.J.Sansom who writes the Shardlake historical crime series set in 16th-century London – outside our usual period, but he gets an honorable mention this month in RG's review of The Lost Prophecies. And perhaps we can review one of the Shardlake series here in our non-medieval pages. (How about it, Rowena?)
Extremely highy recommended, then. And not only for Hispanophiles.
JM
