Ventures into the Spanish past
Raymond Carr
WINTER IN MADRID by C. J. Sansom Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 536, ISBN 1405005467 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 SHANGHAI NIGHTS by Juan Marsé Harvill Secker, £12.99, pp. 195, ISBN 1843431505 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The complex plots of C. J. Sansom’s novel revolve around the adventures in Spain during the civil war and its aftermath of three old boys of a fictional public school. Harry Brett comes from an army family, prospers at school and is elected a fellow of a Cambridge college. Bernie Piper is a working-class scholarship boy who regards public schools as machines for grinding out compliant servants of bourgeois capitalism. Leaving in disgust, he joins the Communist party, volunteers for the International Brigades and is presumed killed at the battle of Jarama in February 1937. Sandy Forsyth, son of a bishop, detests school as restricting his activities on the racetracks and in London brothels. Fully aware of the brutal repression of the Francoist regime, his motto is ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’ and he prospers as a shady businessman in a corrupt society.
British intelligence services in Spain were engaged, as we now know, in bribing Spanish generals to keep Spain from becoming Hitler’s ally in the second world war. They become interested in a gold mine, one of Sandy’s business ventures, which would supply Franco with much needed foreign credit. Harry is recruited to spy on Sandy, his old school friend. In Spain he meets Barbara who had fallen deeply in love with Bernie; thinking him dead after being wounded at Jarama, she is rescued from desperation and depression by Sandy whose mistress she becomes. Later, learning he is alive in a Francoist concentration camp, she plans to engineer his escape. It all ends in a blood-bath. The Francoist intelligence services had followed Barbara’s plans from the start. Barbara, Harry and Bernie escape to Madrid, taking refuge in the British embassy. Sandy, who has turned up to murder Bernie, fiercely jealous of him as Barbara’s former lover, vanishes.
A detective novelist, Sansom triumphs as he unravels the tissues of lies and deceptions that lead to the blood-bath. As a historical novel it is flawed. To explain the historical context in which all his characters are involved, he puts imagined speeches in the mouths of real persons: Lord Templewood, British ambassador in Madrid, and Hillgarth, in charge of intelligence operations in Spain. This is an old device, rarely convincing except in the hands of a great artist like Tolstoy. Not only this, they are essential actors in Sansom’s drama and must be credible. Not all will accept his characterisation of Templewood.
Sansom has an explicit political message: the exposure of Francoism as an evil regime. The defeated of the civil war are presented as the unblemished heroes of an epic struggle against Fascism. The villains in the Republican ranks are the communists, seen as vicious apparatchiks of Stalin. This is a version of the complex and convoluted politics of the civil war which will delight neoconservative communist-bashers and residual McCarthyites. As for the victors of the civil war, they are presented as a bunch of corrupt time-servers, venal priests, sadistic nuns and boneheaded generals.
Just as I met members of the opposition to Franco in Spain and Toulouse, I made it my business as a historian to become friends with many of Franco’s generals after the civil war. Among them was General Martinez Campos, an austere man who endeavoured to get a pension for the Republican general Rojo, a proposal Franco rejected out of hand saying Rojo was ‘scum’. Kindelan regarded Franco as a vulgar adventurer who had sullied the honour of the army. Aranda, another military misfit in the Byzantine world of Francoism, whom I visited frequently when he was under house arrest, was no bonehead but an intellectual soldier, even if he did admire Arnold Toynbee. Sansom’s only ‘real’ general is the absurd, much wounded Milan Astray with his famous shout, ‘Down with Intelligence!’ Historians, like historical novelists, are engaged in the imaginative reconstruction of the past. Sansom’s reconstruction is based on the memoirs of the dead and the work of living historians. He has no alternative, given his age. Great historical novels well out of personal experiences: Solzhenitsyn had spent years in Stalin’s gulags; Dostoevsky moved in the murky world of conspirators which he describes in The Devils. Such novelists can enrich the imagination of historians professionally tied to their orthodox sources. Juan Marsé is such a novelist. He does not import real figures into his narrative nor has he an explicit political message. He describes the sordid poverty and repression of the Barcelona of the 1950s through the lives of a wonderfully drawn assortment of invented characters. The wildly eccentric Captain Blay, obsessed that a faulty gas main and the fumes of a plastics factory will poison the lungs of Susana, a bedridden, sexually perverse beauty.
She idolised her absent father Kim as a hero of the guerrilla war against Franco in southern France. Forcat, an old disabused anarchist, now a refugee and a lodger with her mother, sustains Susana’s dreams by fabricating a story which casts Kim as a hero. But the mysterious ‘Denis’, a repulsive man with greased hair, arrives from Toulouse to expose Kim as an informer who has run off with Denis’s wife. Susana becomes a prostitute managed by ‘Denis’. Forcat — or is it Susana?— shoots him. Marsé uses such ambiguities to achieve dramatic tension. Sansom’s gripping, readable story is presented as a piece of real life such as might be written by an intelligent investigative journalist who had read the novels of Zola. It lands him in ridiculous unreal situations as when Harry attempts to strangle Templewood. Don Quixote gets into ridiculous situations, but so great is Cervantes’ imagination that the don becomes a credible human being. This is what happens to Marsé’s creations, eccentric though they seem. You feel you might recognise one of them on a street corner in downtown Barcelona.
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