Soldiers of Salamis

This is a very good novel - probably the best I've read by a writer not previously known to me in many years. It earned Catalan author Javier Cercas a number of literary prizes in Spain and has sold 500,000 copies worldwide. I'd recommend it to anyone, with the sole caveat that a knowledge of, and interest in, the Spanish Civil War might be a requirement for its full enjoyment. Though if this sounds like a deterrent, it shouldn't be.

Superficially this is a tale about its own genesis; a rather clever trick really, which allows Cercas to overcome some of the potential limitations of his sources.

A narrator (also called Javier Cercas) relates how both professionally and romantically he found himself in the doldrums, unable to locate what Henry James used to call his donné - the gift of a story idea that would set him in motion again. ("A person doesn't write about what he wants to write about but what he's capable of writing about.", the narrator reflects.)

An opportunity to interview a contemporary Spanish literary figure called Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio unearths an interesting anecdote about that writer's father, "Spain's first fascist" Rafael Sanchez Mazas, co-founder of the Falange and a key instigator of the conflict.

Mazas was a good if not great poet, a physically-cowardly aesthete that dreamed of fashioning a reactionary paradise in his homeland. As luck would have it he sat out most of the war either in hiding or in captivity and as Cercas discovers, had a most fortuitous escape from a firing squad set up by the fleeing Republicans after Barcelona had fallen to Franco.

When the bullets started to tear into his fellow prisoners' flesh Mazas sprinted into the trees. Shortly afterwards however his hiding place was discovered by a lone Republican soldier, but this man just stared at him with a strangely joyful expression then turned away leaving him to flee further into the forest. There he was aided by local farmers and a group of Republican deserters that he was later able to protect from the Nationalist revenge machine during an undistinguished career in el Caudillo's government as Minister without Portfolio. Mazas was "always...a haughty, brittle and melancholic genius" and "a failed Autumnal gentleman", whose intellectual stance was ultimately a bit too ironic for Franco's post-war regime.

So at first it seems that Cercas' intent is to investigate this story in order to see what he can learn about men such as Mazas who "won the war, but lost the history of literature". He finds and interrogates a number of individuals with more direct knowledge of actual events and in the middle section the narrator steps back entirely leaving us with a straight third-person novelistic account of the Falangist's escape from the massacre.

Then at the start of the last third of the book, Cercas re-appears and admits that something significant is missing from his story. However, another chance exchange with a Chilean writer called Roberto Bolaño (a real person who died in 2003 from liver disease) subsequently leads him to an old people's home in Dijon and a moving encounter with Antoni Miralles, a battle-scarred old Republican who just might be the man who spared the cowering writer in the woods.

Mazas told his "forest friends" that he would write his own account of his (mis-) adventure and title it Soldiers of Salamis, probably in reference to Oswald Spengler's declaration that at the eleventh hour Civilisation has always needed saving by a "squad of soldiers", like the Athenians at Salamis. He never wrote his book, but Cercas steals its title in order to make the point that instead it was un-sung heroes on the other side, in paricular men like Miralles, that saved the world that we now inhabit.

Whenever challenged, Cercas the factitious narrator insists that he is working on a "true story" as opposed to a novel. ("You have to be an out-and-out liar to be a good novelist don't you?", Miralles quips at him.) Across all the different strands, Cercas the author playfully manages all the resulting tensions between fact and fiction, recollection and imagination and delivers a deceptively clever and nuanced literary work that sets you thinking about the nature of historical memory and myth-making. And it's all held together by subtle thematic and symbolic glue.

Towards the end of the book Cercas appears to step up the urgency of his tone, perhaps in an effort to squeeze every last drop of value-added meanings out of his factual material. Some might conclude that the text swells with sentimentality here, but I think Cercas has more or less prevented an overflow. He would have known that his story would have to pack a strong emotional payload to overcome generations of collective amnesia in his homeland. Indeed, Miralles expresses this obstacle with the words "those stories don't interest anyone any more, not even those of us that lived through them".

Cercas' main conceit here is to set himself up as the key protagonist with the stated quest of extracting more from these related eye-witness accounts than a purely non-fictional treatment could achieve. Perhaps it's surprising that this book ultimately provides such a satisfying read, because Cercas stops short of providing complete answers to many of the questions he raises. Yet when the main question is how much factual content does the Truth require, perhaps that is understandable. As another Spaniard of the era once said, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth". (Pablo Picasso).

It is certainly worth brushing up on the Spanish Civil War. I have always felt it was one of the most significant macro-events in twentieth century history, largely because the most entrenched and extreme ideologies in Europe at that time emerged suddenly into a direct confrontation that was throughout relatively uncomplicated by more moderate representative models and the usual revolutionary background process of state deconstruction and reconstruction. You can read a lot about World War II without having to seriously engage with the ideological background. Not so the conflict in Spain.