FICTION: Among history's many confusions, none is as chaotic as the Spanish Civil War. In terms of conflict and its legacies, an almost comic squalor shrouds this particular episode of 20th century violence.
War remains one of literature's enduring great themes. Yet the turmoil in Spain, though creating a literary martyr in the personal tragedy of Lorca, appears to have failed to date to inspire a novel worthy of the horrors.
Hemingway's overblown melodrama For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940), has never proved more than a hollow gesture, although it was, at least, a gesture. However, Spanish writer Javier Cercas appears to have finally redressed this lack in a remarkable book that manages to be unusually profound without the slightest trace of pretension.
For once the blurbs ring true. The Soldiers of Salamis notes the complexities without attempting to unravel them. This is a novel that, although written some 60 years after the events, attempts neither analysis nor answers. Cercas approaches the madness and the lies through the story of an individual who survived. Rafael Sánchez Mazas is most emphatically not a hero; he is not even remotely sympathetic. He, Mazas, was a writer, "a good minor writer" as Cercas reminds us throughout. More importantly, Mazas was a fascist and a founder of the Spanish Falange. In the dying moments of the war, he found himself one of a group of Nationalist prisoners who are taken out to be shot.
Luck intervened, and Mazas - a cool character, at that time middle-aged, privileged throughout his life and always a person whose innate sophistication carried him a step further in life than it should have - escaped. It seems unlikely in the face of a waiting firing squad but, having been only grazed by the bullets meant for him, he scrambled into the nearby undergrowth. There, he found himself looking directly into the eyes of a militiaman who should have killed him in the name of war, or at least the objectives of the other side. But the soldier merely walked away. Why?
It is a great story - as well as a human mystery, and is recognised as both by the narrator. A journalist and author of two novels, whose father has died, whose wife has left him and, if not feeling bad enough about his life, the narrator, Cercas, is also battling with the realisation that he will never be the writer he wanted to be. Far from being a self-pitying wreck, however, Cercas ensures his narrator - himself - emerges as a likeable fellow with a sense of humour and a slightly overpowering girlfriend, Conchi, who works as fortune teller on television.
Far from being a worthy reconstruction of the Civil War, the narrative begins and sustains a conversational tone. Cercas is simply recounting what happened when he wrote an article marking the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. Once you write something about anything, further information has a habit of making its way towards you. But before that, he had attempted to interview one of the sons of Mazas.
Time passes, and what had been some curiosity about what really happened in the woods becomes a preoccupation. Letters follow the publication of his article, and one of them is from an historian who informs Cercas that Mazas was not the only one to survive the execution in the woods. More clues appear, pieces of a long-forgotten puzzle. Another man's son with half-recalled memories of "just one of those family stories" also has something to contribute. Cercas begins to assemble a sense of what might have occurred, what could have happened - perhaps even what he would have liked to have happened.
The journalist in Cercas tussles with the novelist. The resulting narrative possesses life and energy. Considering the subject matter as well as the weight of memory versus truth, The Soldiers of Salamis is written with a convincing lightness of touch and near-conversational ease. Cercas is as fascinated as the reader.
Of course, it is a bit of mystery. Who was the soldier? Why did he let Mazas live? There is also the bizarre coincidences that bring Cercas to interview a Chilean novelist who just so happens to recall an old friendship that flourished in a French campsite some 20 years earlier. This belongs to the third act as it were of the novel.
Cercas tells his narrative in three parts. While each is shaped by that conversational tone he successfully sustains, the sections are different. It is as if the first is a statement: it acts as an aftermath pointing to the way in which the past becomes history, leaving the mildly interested to attempt to figure it out. In the second part, Cercas as a novelist recreates that past through the story of Mazas, anti-hero and survivor. It follows the series of adventures that lead Mazas through the war and on to some fame following it and, more interestingly, a long, self-chosen obscurity.
This is also the point at which Cercas takes his book far beyond an investigation of one man's wartime experiences. An important passage is concerned with more than events in Spain, "during the time the war was incubating, the watchwords Sanchez Mazas disseminated still possessed a gleaming suggestion of modernity, that young patriots from good families and the violent ideals they cherished contributed to strengthening. At that time José Antonio was very fond of quoting a phrase of Oswald Spengler's: that at the 11th hour it had always been a squad of soldiers that had saved civilisation." History might respond otherwise to Spengler's statement.
Cercas may as well be referring to all soldiers in all wars when he writes of the young Falangists, that they "felt they were that squad of soldiers . . . They felt their duty was to preserve civilisation by force and avoid catastrophe . . . They felt they were heroes. Although he was no longer young and lacked the physical strength, courage and even the essential conviction to be one . . . Sanchez Mazas also felt it, and thus abandoned literature to give himself over to the cause with priestly devotion".
Later in that same middle section, Cercas writes of Mazas late in life. "Probably by then he no longer believed in anything. Probably in his heart, never in his life had he truly believed in anything and least of all, in what he'd defended or preached. He practiced politics, but deep down always scorned them." It is a dark portrait executed with chilling distance. Yet, elsewhere in the final section, itself a robust fairytale of sorts, he examines with warmth and humour heroism, the heroic and the unlikely face of a true hero.
Published in Spanish in 2001, and a deserving winner of a clutch of prizes, this is an important, fresh and original book; it looks at truth and memory and human motivation. It is also about all wars, as well as dreams and hope. Above all, it demonstrates how eloquent and exciting fiction is still capable of being.
The Soldiers of Salamis
By Javier Cercas, trans Anne McLean
Bloosmbury, 213 pp, £14.99
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
