A corpse in waiting

Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous hero, a soldier in the Spanish civil war. The book won major prizes and transformed Cercas from a respected Spanish novelist into an international literary figure.

Eighteen years on, he returns to the war with his new novel, Lord of All the Dead. This time his theme is the nature of heroism itself, interwoven with a more personal quest: a reluctant picking over the bones of his great-uncle Manuel Mena, a hero of the Franco era who became an embarrassment to his family as the wheel of history turned. It’s a subversive and disenchanted view of war in general and the Spanish conflict in particular, in a fine translation by Anne McLean.

As in his earlier novel, Cercas is a slippery narrator, shifting in and out of the story, sometimes taking an overview with a documentary, almost forensic tone, at other times assuming the first person role of ‘Javier Cercas’ researching his family’s past — then pulling the rug from this conceit with post-modernist glee:

If I were a literato and this were a piece of fiction I could fantasise about what happened, I would be authorised to do so. If I were a literato I could, for example, imagine Manuel Mena waking his men… I could imagine his fear and I could imagine him fearless…

And then he hits us with two shocking pages of the imagined battle: ‘The blazing red of the blood on the white snow; from the sobs of the mortally wounded to the deafening silence of the corpses…’ Enjoying both the freedom of fiction and the denial of its use, Cercas cheekily adds:

All this I could imagine.