C.J. Sansom paints a vivid and detailed portrait of post-Civil War Spain in Winter in Madrid. It's a brick of a book with over 500 pages, but one you can totally immerse yourself in--a juicy, suspenseful tale. I really love good historical novels, though my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath is hazy at best, I'm sorry to say. The story is somewhat intricate in its plotting, and things are complicated by the fact that it moves around in time. I never felt especially bogged down, however, and once I had a sense of who was who and how their political ideologies differed, I was happy to sit back and let the story unfold.
There are several different threads to the story that converge and intersect, the main one concerns Harry Brett. This is a spy story and Harry is very reluctantly our spy. He's recruited by the British Secret Service to make contact with a former school friend, Sandy Forsyth, who's involved in suspect business dealings in Spain. It's 1940 and Franco is being wooed by the Nazis to come into the war on their side, so the climate is tense to say the least. It's believed that gold deposits have been found, which would make Spain less reliant on Britain and more apt to enter the war, which is the last thing the British want or need. Forsyth, always eager to make his fortune dips his fingers into many pots, including this one, which is where Harry comes in.
Harry is an upperclass Englishman with a strong sense of duty to 'God and Country', so he feels honor bound to do his part in the war despite having already fought and been wounded at Dunkirk. A product of Rookwood, a distinguished boy's public school, Harry has bought into Rookwood's strict code of ethics. Not all students were so impressionable or unquestioning however. Sandy, always a troublemaker and a bit of a black sheep was only too happy to get himself expelled, ready to show his family and the world he could succeed on his own. But it's Harry's good friend Bernie Piper who's feeling restless and at odds with the system. Unlike Harry and Sandy, Bernie comes from a working class background and soon finds himself questioning the status quo and Rookwood's values and is drawn to the Communist philosophy and inexorably towards Spain.
Bernie invites Harry to travel with him to Spain, which in 1931 is an exciting place; it's on the cusp of a worker's revolution and radical change. A few years later Bernie joins the International Brigades to fight on the Republican side of the Civil War and goes missing at the bloody Battle of Jarama--missing and presumed dead. When Harry returns to Spain as a spy he discovers Barbara Clare, Bernie's former lover, has taken up with Sandy. They make an unlikely pair, but Barbara is wrestling with demons of her own. She's unconvinced that Bernie is really dead and after information about him is passed her way, she begins her own perilous search for him.
This is a novel rich in ideas and historical fact, and while there is really quite a lot to it, I found it hard to put down. It's easy now to read about WWII knowing the outcomes, but it must have been terrifying at the time not knowing if the Germans were going to succeed in invading England. Harry is playing a dangerous game where the rules have changed since his Rookwood days. He is still honorable in a corrupt world. Sansom has created really believable characters that come to question their own ideals and motivations--most of them anyway.
All this is playing out against the backdrop of an already war ravaged country. The people, once so filled with hope are now living in despair. In Spain in the 40s there is a bleak and grim reality for the common people who must endure difficulties with even the most common necessities needed in day to day living. There is not enough food, or jobs, and there are often power outages. And there is a constant fear of retribution for past alliances. While I've read a fair amount of war fiction, this is the first time I can remember reading anything from this perspective, so in a way it was a much needed history lesson--or the beginnings of one.
I'll have to take a look now at Sansom's Matthew Shardlake's mysteries set in Tudor England, though I wouldn't mind if he wrote more about this period as well. I can easily see Winter in Madrid being made into a movie along the lines of Atonement. It would be filled with atmospheric scenes, though perhaps chilling and dark, with a story that races along until it's heart-stopping ending!