Review of A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

This is a novel, based on real events and some of the characters, including the poet Pablo Neruda and the dictators Franco and Pincochet are, of course, real historical figures. This sort of book is less common in Anglo-Saxon literary circles than elsewhere, but in the classical Roman era pretty well all “histories” were like this, because Roman scholars and gentlemen, such as Tacitus, had a contempt for “mere facts” and expected something that would tell them what historical characters thought and felt and why they did the things which made history.

What Pablo Neruda did to make history was charter a ship, the Winnipeg, to take a couple of thousand refugees of the Spanish Civil War, many Catalans and Basques, from France, where they had been neglected as maliciously as only the French authorities knew how, to Chile, where it seemed as if they might face an uncertain future. While the refugees’ arrival was still anticipated, the various factions of Chile’s divided society projected their own prejudices and expectations on the refugees, but when they arrived they were welcomed and seen for what they were, after which most of them made themselves part of Chile. Neruda’s genius contributed to this integration in a subtle but effective way: he may have selected the refugees more widely than the Chilean president had instructed him to do, but each one was told that they were being allowed into Chile for whatever skill it was that they had, so they all arrived with the idea of making a fresh start with that skill and making a life for themselves. They fled from Spain into France to get away from Franco and probable murder, were treated astonishingly badly in their country of first refuge, but Neruda transformed what started as a second desperate flight into something more positive.

This book shows you this through the eyes of many well-drawn fictional characters, which gives a fair impression of the Spanish Civil war -the author doesn’t allow the reader to think that only Franco’s forces committed atrocities and it is clear that no democracy could really have supported the nun-killing Republicans. The international figures who did intervene in the Spanish Civil War were Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, none of whom held the slightest concern for any Spanish person on either side or the future of Spain. It was all a courtship dance, sacrificing Spanish lives so that Hitler and Stalin could come to terms and form the unholy alliance of dictators which conquered Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway (and almost Finland), Holland, Belgium, France and Greece before it all broke down and Hitler tried to conquer Russia.

That isn’t part of the story, though, because when the refugees reached Chile, they left Europe and its agonies behind them and the dramas become those of families rather than nations, until Pinochet comes to power in Chile and the refugees have to flee Chile and make a new life for themselves elsewhere in South America until it is safe to return, first to Spain on Franco’s death, and then to Chile, their true home.

Why I requested and read this book:

I have always been interested in the Spanish Civil War, because as a schoolboy my father saw six slightly older boys from his school off on a train from London to France, where they would cross the border into Spain and volunteer to fight for the Republican militias. He would see just one of them again. He did not go with them, because of his step-father, a rare survivor from what the Kaiser called, in 1914 “a contemptible little army” who made a stand against a German advance that was rolling up Belgium and France, at a place called Mons. My step-grandfather, a trained and experienced professional soldier with medals going back to 1911, properly equipped and with the might of the British Empire behind him, found stopping the Imperial German Army in its tracks to be somewhat problematic. He knew that the untrained boys going to Spain, with no equipment beyond the walking boots they had been told to purchase and no support from the majority of the British public, had scant chance of survival, let alone success. Having no time whatsoever for symbolic acts of suicide, he convinced my father not to go to Spain, but to wait until Hitler did something to unite the British public against him (something he had very skillfully avoided doing at that point in time) and then something EFFECTIVE might be done. My step-grandfather held effectiveness in greater esteem than heroism and my father was sternly directed on a trajectory towards doing the most effective thing he possibly could, even if it held no opportunity for fame and glory.

A Long Petal of the Sea is published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Available from:

Waterstones

Amazon.co.uk