I bought this book about two years ago and then forgot about it.
Please don’t take me wrong, I love reading, but sometimes I buy a whole batch of books, probably when the bookstore is on sale, and end with more books than spare time for reading. I picked up the book yesterday night, and was so immersed in the story, that had to read it all at once. It is truly superb.
The novel is the story of doctor Daniel Da Barca, a socialist Spaniard who is not only a brilliant medic but also a left-wing agitator in Franco’s 1936 Spain. The story is told in flashes by his guard cell (and police informant) Herbal, intermixed with the story of Daniel’s girl friend, and other characters detained in the Santiago de Compostela jail complex.
I don’t want to give too much away of the plot, because, as most brilliant novels on the Spanish Civil War, the plot is either complex or profound. What is profound is the interaction between the characters, perfect examples of the polarization of Spain society in the 1930’s.
Daniel is the typical left wing idealist, a college medic and brilliant at his career, which believes in the communist manifesto and is willing to offer his life in the struggle of the Spain Republic. Herbal plays the exact opposite, the rural boy whose upbringing in a poor (and illiterate) family in Galicia, made him bitter and distrustful, and found as an adult an escape route in the militia. Blindly following the military precepts and catholic precepts of the Franco right wing, we learn of the environment in which the clash of the civil war brewed.
The third element gets incorporated through the other detainees: simple workers and union members, the left wing that had neither cultural baggage or deep idealism, but pushed the political agenda as a way to overcome the predominant status quo of Spaniard society, where the illiterate accepted whatever was norm and brute was deemed better than intellectual.
I read a lot about the Spain Civil War, and the same elements crop time and time again. The father who was more of a brute than anything else; the son who grew under constant beating and oppression; the educated left looking for a social change; the educated right looking for way to further their domination. These are factors in every good novel on the subject, and are indicators of why this society came to an ebullition point culminating in the civil war and the crimes against humanity the secret police perpetrated on the remains of the republic when its right to power was challenged by the left.