53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A thriller set in Spain just after the Civil War, September 11, 2007
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 clichés, 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Code for Sovereigns!, February 9, 2009
The fossils Sandy Forsyth loves are a wonderful metaphor for the historical period this novel spans, 1937-1947, in war-torn Spain. For fossils hold full or partial body parts in their last colossal, life-death battle. It's a time full of surprises, when the strong are shown to be weak and vice versa. Sandy's favorite fossil, a dinosaur's limb, vividly displays Spain's hopes and defeats, "...curled, as though the creature had been about to strike when it died."
First, meet Bernie Piper, a graduate of the prestigious Rookwood School in England, now lying at the foot of a knoll in the Jarama Valley, Spain in February of 1937. He's a die-hard socialist, rejecting everything he learned in school and sharing the fight against the Generalissimo Franco's fascist followers. It doesn't look like a victory Bernie will win!
Then get to really know Barbara Clare, an ex in so many ways - ex-Red Cross nurse, ex-lover of Bernie, and expatriate who is lost in her despair over possibly having lost Bernie, seeing the Spanish situation corrode into devastating poverty and death, and being lost in her relationship with Sandy Forsyth who seems bent on recreating her in his own image. But Barbara knows more than she's telling and may have a way to find out if Bernie is still alive as a prisoner of war in the brutal prisoner-of-war camps run by the rigid, ultra-Catholic Republican Guards.
Enters Harry Brett, a spy for the British Secret Service. Harry really doesn't want to be doing this job but is reluctantly enticed into spying on his old school friend, Sandy, in Madrid. Harry's recovering from brutal injuries he received while fighting in Dunkirk, barely over his posttraumatic panic attacks and barely in possession of full hearing yet. The pages that follow rivet the reader's focus in two directions.
The convoluted chronology of Spain's political situation introduces the reader to the powers supporting Franco, the Republicans and the Communists, all vying for supremacy and at the same time feeling Hitler's pincer-like approach ever-looming. Who to trust? Who to support? How to survive? One clearly sees, after a brief while, that there are no winners as each group in its fanatical fervor destroys the land they claim to love. Leaders and manipulators flourish; the poor and destitute live parasitical lives in order to get through this horrific conflict.
What Harry eventually discovers, in the second focus of this novel, is far worse than originally contemplated. Sandy's involved in something bigger and deadlier than even he realizes. As one swiftly turns these pages, he or she is stunned at the breathtaking end in which all bets are off and the plot unravels in a most unexpected manner with devastating results.
C. J. Sansom, with a well-researched, dynamic presentation, vividly presents a historical, romantic, adventurous story in a tightly plotted manner. This story deserves wide acclaim as a notable blockbuster, portraying a too often ignored but potent segment of Spain and England's history and politics.
Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on February 9, 2009
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192250339_.gif){kind=small}
