| Date: 13 April 2011, 06:51
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Harry Brett, who had studied Spanish at Cambridge, has been in Spain three times: in 1931 when he went there on holiday with Bernie Piper, an old schoolfriend of his and a Communist. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Bernie went back to Spain to fight for the Republicans, and was reported missing, believed killed. Harry went back a second time in 1937, at the request of Bernie's parents, to see whether he could find out what exactly had happened to Bernie. The Republican side was then controlled by the Russians who took him for a bourgeois spy, and he was given 24 hours to leave. His third visit was in 1940. The Civil War had ended in 1939 with Franco's victory, and it was touch and go whether Spain would enter the war on Hitler's side. Harry was now, for his third visit, sent out to the British Embassy by the Secret Service, ostensibly as a translator, but actually to spy on another former school friend of his, Sandy Forsyth, who was doing business with the Falangists.
This scenario enables Sansom, moving backwards and forwards in time, to paint a vivid and evocative picture of Spain in this period: the grim Republican resistance to Franco's advancing forces during the civil war, the ruined and dilapidated state of Madrid just after the civil war under Franco's rule, the hatreds which were still blazing when the war was over. It is clear where Sansom's sympathies lie: he paints scathing pictures of the Catholic clergy, is contemptuous of the wealthy Franco supporters, and has made Bernie the novel's hero. The historical background is very well researched. The tensions on the hapless Republican side, between Liberals, Stalinists and Trotskyists are fairly well known, but Sansom is also illuminating on the tension between the victors: between the Falangists and the monarchists. So on each side everyone is plotting against everyone else. There is at least one real historical figure in the book: Sir Samuel Hoare, the British ambassador to the Franco regime at the time, anxious to keep Spain out of the Second World War and hoping to find allies in this endeavour among the monarchists.
Interwoven with Harry's activities as a spy, there are two love stories. One involves Barbara Clare, who had met and fallen in love with Bernie when she was an unpolitical Red Cross nurse during the civil war. After his disappearance she lived with Sandy, but was still trying to find out whether Bernie was not still alive - a dangerous thing to do in Franco Spain. The other involves Harry and a young left-wing Spanish woman.
The plot moves forward a little slowly in the first half of this very long book of 549 pages, but I did not mind that: my interest did not flag; and anyway the pace quickens and the tension rises about half way through. The style occasionally degenerates into cliches, but there are many memorable set pieces, including a particularly haunting one about a pack of feral dogs in the ruins of Madrid. And those who know Spain only through their summer holidays will not be familiar with the winter's biting cold, which here enters into the reader's bones.
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