GUERNICA

I have to confess much ignorance of modern history.  Obviously I know something about the First and Second World Wars, and I knew that various artists and writers went to fight in the Spanish Civil War: but there my sparse knowledge ended.  My only excuse is that I never studied it in any depth at school: we 'did' Napoleon at one point and I vaguely remember something about Catherine the Great and Peter the Great in Russia, but otherwise my European history education consisted only of anything relevant to studying Latin or, in History 'A' level, the period from 496 to approximately 1100.

I had also heard of Picasso's painting 'Guernica' without knowing what it was.  Then in the library recently when I was browsing relatively aimlessly for reading material, I came across a book of the same name.  Reading the blurb on the back it sounded as if it might have that mix of fiction and historical background to which I seem to have been attracted in novels recently, and so without thinking too hard or long I picked it up.

Growing up having heard various violent news stories about the Basque separatists, I wasn't sure whether this might be a somewhat biased account of an event.  What I hadn't appreciated - due to my ignorance of any detail in relation to the Spanish Civil War - was the involvement of the Luftwaffe and the Nazis with Franco's efforts to control the country.

Whilst the novel concentrates on and opens with passages which make clear the vibrancy of Basque culture, it makes no detailed mention of the troublesome and difficult Spanish political and economic situation which resulted in the Civil War.  In a way it is clearly pro-Basque, but largely because our sympathies need to be with the victims of the bombing of this small (c.4,000 population: not much bigger than Brampton, or the village in Somerset where I grew up) and apparently undefended and unprepared community.  The novel concentrates on the personalities of the main characters and less on external events, although inevitably those cannot be totally ignored, and even the UK ultimately comes into the picture.

One part of the novel which I think will remain with me, emotionally, is the build-up to the bombing.  As readers we know it is going to happen but the hours prior to it pass slowly, even almost frustratingly.  The characters in the book continue about their daily lives.  Little which is out of the ordinary for them happens during the build-up.  There is talk about possibly cancelling the usual Monday market, but otherwise even once the two main female characters evenutally arrive in the town the only out of the ordinary occurences are that it is full of refugees and a long queue of people is waiting to purchase railway tickets to get out of there.  Life is already unsettled: people have been short of food for months, shelters have been built (and as it turns out, poorly designed): they think they are prepared as they can be for military attack.  What they do not expect is for that attack to come from the sky in wave after wave of Luftwaffe bombings.

When the attack occurs it is almost a relief as the build-up has taken so long, even though the outcome is inevitable: the deaths of some of the characters are predicted and indicated early in the novel.  But the horror of it is worse because we have become involved with the characters as people, even though our main identification is probably with Miguel, working in the woods outside the town.

After the bombing, the deaths and destruction, the pacing of the novel then changes for a third time and there is a quiet and sad period.  World events now come to the fore a little more as the main characters struggle to come to terms with their grief and with what appears to be an empty future.  They cannot, initially, communicate their grief and loss to others: likewise the book tends to concentrate on what is happening rather than descriptions of feelings.  It is not difficult to imagine those feelings, and Miguel's dreams of his dead wife help describe beautifully his suffering.

The build-up to a more positive future is, as one would expect, slow: and it is perhaps somewhat typical of a novel by an American writer that there is almost the obligatory happy ending.  However that is to make it sound trite, which it is not: the discovery of the 'lost baby' perhaps helps the book to reach a conclusion by giving some sense of a better future.

If nothing else this book made me want to go away and read up on Basque history - my interest in border areas arising again! - and there is a useful bibliography at the end.

To conclude: I liked the pacing of the book: I felt the writer was deft in using timing to create atmosphere; I liked the characters described; and whatever the political rights and wrongs of the situation, this painted a vibrant picture of a community hit suddenly by violence.  The shock must have been not dissimilar to the Lockerbie bombing, 9/11, or the Dunblane or Hungerford shootings, as examples.  Innocent people suffered terribly and the question in my mind is always 'was that really necessary?'.