The Fell of Dark, by James Norman

[p024] The Fell of Dark. James Norman. Michael Joseph. 18s. Spain continues the most evocative noun in politics: still, yet and in Spite of the soiled all, monumentally Teminiscent of the gallantry, élan and finality of revolutionary assault. So, naturally enough, one approaches a novel ‘about the Spanish Civil War’ with caution, suspicion and irony, expecting always either that his- torian’s formal novel which proves to be all playacting atop the form- less, uncomprehended and _ faceless movements of the masses, or, alter- natively, that formal popular novel- ist’s charade of goodies versus bad- ies in a period setting, and loath- ing in both that wordy treachery which so inevitably comes down firmly on both sides of the matter. And, Pues!—before page 13 is out we are seeing Don Luis, the eminent philosopher, through the worshipping eyes of his bootblack, and the whole novel teeters on the shifty verge of that Steinbeckian whimsicality which is literature’s homage to ithe order books of booksellers. One begins to agree with the blurb, that it is going to be, much as usual, ‘exciting, thoughtful and, above all, compas- sionate’, and much too thensome to be digestible. ‘It is’, suggests one’s closing left hand, ‘just another novel about some Civil War or other... - But, just as one begins to think that reading this particular novel] is cul- turally and historically neither here nor there, the characters emerge at a gallop from their stockbox, and the race promises to be interesting. There is Don Luis, of course, and Captain Bernal, and, necessarily, an Inglés, Suckling, and of course all the others in their battles and brothels, and it becomes a potentially good read, when one has lots of spare time, that is. But at this point a very strange thing happens: out of the interweav- ings of the stockboxers, out of the battles and brothels, emerge, also, a host of circumjacent characters, some personally described, others merely implied in their social activity, but all living and dying the crucial deci- sions of their liyes. They are a trace peripheral, true, but they actively in- habit the novel, and later, strangely, haunt the memory. They actually make one worry about Spain, just as ‘Potemkin’ forces one to worry about the Russian Revolution. In fact, one has at times the impression that one is watching a Unity Theatre concoc- tion played against a filmic back- ground of ‘Potemkin’ episodes—‘Po- temkin’ plus foreknowledge of Stalin- ism. There are comments, very hurtful ones, which will bring the red pen- 103 cils to the outraged fingers of clerics of minor republics and railway book- stalls, and which might startle the wordworn habitual reader into the belief that truth is to be the next gimmick. Political parties and: tend- encies are given flicks or pats in pass- ing, so to speak. But, increasingly, poignantly, that sense of a people participating—it is so seldom done, particularly into English. Sadly, the pressure descends again towards the end. The plot tightens —goodies become goodier, baddies deader or deadlier—and the Fascists arrive to end the suspense of all concerned, living, dead, or, surviv- ing, merely auditory. Loves end or mend, but the moral, sadly, slurs into a sort of opportunist’s mysticism: the heroes trot away to have, as it were, an altogether sanitary think about it all. There is a crushing sense of in- sufficiency—as though, during a dis- cussion on the future of socialism, someone mentioned The Rt. Hon. Gaitskell. History is thrown, by a sort of weary default, to the lower middle classes—-with the effect of leaving Franco ten feet tall. But— but—but, oddly and strangely, the two millions of Spanish dead and the millions remaining without bene- fit of literary resolvement, remain in the memory, neither pointless nor featureless. James Norman did not, after all, bring out our dead merely to bury them. His—and our—dead will, on the contrary, march through the next half hundred novels, be- coming part of his reader’s memory and recognition. There is a wry ‘Salud!’ in at least two hundred of these very skilfully written pages. GRHE.