Spaniards were long kept in the dark about their complicated history: first, because Franco’s one-sided version was the only one taught until after he died in 1975. After that, as part of Spain’s transition to democracy, the government enacted a “pact of forgetting,” hoping it would help the country move on from its painful past.

But deep within those who lived through the Spanish Civil War was an anguished and certain knowledge that could not be extinguished.  In the last decade or two, authors, filmmakers, academics and others began to show a way forward, Isabel Allende among them.

Allende has a deeply personal connection with this saga of war, fascism and democracy which begins in Spain and ends in her Chilean homeland. Among other things, her uncle was Salvador Allende whose government was toppled by Chile’s military coup.

If you come to this book expecting historical fiction that aligns closely with real life, you will be amply rewarded. The main character is Valencian, Victor Dalmau, who is studying medicine in Barcelona when war breaks out. He is not yet a doctor but when the military coup erupts he is thrown into the maelstrom.

The first chapter takes place towards the end of the three-year war when the Republican Army, having run out of older men, is reduced to conscripting fifteen and sixteen year old boys — the “baby bottle generation.”

Victor comes across a horrifically injured young soldier whose exposed heart has stopped and is expected to die. In a spur of the moment, even inspired, decision, Victor massages the stilled heart. Miraculously, it resumes beating and the boy goes on to survive.

This stilled-then-beating heart is an apt metaphor for Allende’s story of Victor Dalmau and his family: his brother Guillem (killed in the war), his mother Carme, and a young woman named Roser who was pregnant with Guillem’s child; though it’s not until the book ends that the heart beats strong and true.

As Franco achieves victory in early 1939, the three Dalmau family survivors escape over the Pyrenees into the wretched refugee camps on the fenced beaches of France. There, acclaimed Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, arranges for a boat to bring two thousand of the Spanish refugees to his homeland, among them Victor and Roser who by now has had her baby.

I often felt I was reading an absorbing true story, so wasn’t surprised when Allende wrote in her acknowledgements, “This is a novel, but the events and historical characters are real. The characters are fictional, inspired by people I’ve known. I have had to imagine very little, because as I was doing the exhaustive research…I found I had more than enough material. This book wrote itself, as if it had been dictated to me.”

The only quibble I have is with the title. I know why it was chosen—it is Pablo Neruda’s poetic description of Chile and is Allende’s way of paying tribute—but it initially led my expectations astray and having read other reviews, I suspect I wasn’t the only one.

Five stars for an epic historical novel that strengthens Spain’s heartbeat.

A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. Random House, New York, 2020

Reviewed by Janette Higgins, July 2021

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This blog is about Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins, the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

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Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou. My mini reviews here.