Michael Eaude’s novel The Bones in the Forest on Franco’s legacy in Spain is well worth a read, finds Chris Bambery

Spain is unlucky to hold the second greatest number of unmarked graves in the world, second only to Cambodia. These are the unknown graves of those murdered by the fascists during the 1936-9 Spanish Civil War and in the mass executions which followed the victory of General Franco’s nationalists. Some 114,000 people are buried in mass graves across Spain.

The Bones in the Forest is a novel centred on the movement to uncover these graves and to allow their families to afford their relatives a proper burial. It’s an emotive issue in Spain because where you stand on this largely follows where your family lined up in the civil war.

That’s not to say those on the right who would oppose digging up the bodies are unreconstructed Francoists. They argue it’s best to leave the issue behind and move on, plus they oppose state or local-authority money being used for that purpose.

But it is a toxic debate. The victors lie in their graves, remembered by their loved ones.

The central figure of the novel is Julia, a teacher in the Catalan capital, Barcelona, who is traumatised by the death of her young daughter, the subsequent break down of her marriage, and then divorce. Her mother’s uncle Rogelio is one of three bodies whose graves have been identified in a forest outside a village in the mountains of Aragon, south of the border with France. The mayor of the village, a member of the right-wing Popular Party, has recently been murdered pre-dawn on the road up to the village and it has been besieged by reporters, to the ire of the remaining inhabitants.

On behalf of her 82-mother, Julia agrees to travel to the village to secure the re-burial of Rogelio. That is not going to be easy, because the dead major refused to authorise it, as does his wife who is now acting mayor. Her grandfather was the mayor when the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT captured the village in 1936. He was executed along with the priest after resisting the attack. In the village, she meets Jaime who is leading the campaign to get the three re-buried. A man clearly on the left.

The past and the present

The novel works on different levels. It starts with the murder of the mayor and how Julia is drawn into solving that crime, but it also tells the story of Rogelio and his partner, Juanita (who left the village in Aragon for a new life with the CNT in Barcelona). It’s the summer of 1936 and Barcelona is very tense. Rogelio is a gunman for the CNT involved in incendiary strikes. He meets Juanita at a CNT education class. Both will join the resistance which crushed the fascist uprising in Catalonia and join the CNT advance into Aragon (George Orwell was right there in the militia of the revolutionary-left POUM).

The main setting in the Aragonese village is important to the stories in the novel, to the passions which exist near the surface from the Civil War and over its very survival. Rural Aragon along with much of the interior of Spain is seeing rural de-population on a major scale. With climate change, that also acts to turn large areas into deserts.

The central character, Julia, works well and her efforts to both solve the murder of the village’s mayor and to rebury Rogelio transform her, lifting the trauma she has suffered. The flashbacks to the events of 1936 work well too.

The Bones in the Forest is in large part about contemporary Spain and an issue it has struggled to deal with: the legacy of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. When that ogre died in November 1975, the eventual transition to parliamentary democracy was agreed between those in the regime who knew the game was up, and the two main parties of the anti-fascist opposition, the Socialists and Communists. They agreed an amnesty for Franco’s torturers and executioners, to retain institutions such as the armed forces, the secret services, police, judiciary and courts and to a ‘Pact of Silence’ concerning the bloody repression under fascism. In other words, it left Franco’s crimes unresolved.

In the past decade, that has been partially resolved, but only partially. Franco’s corpse was removed from the hideous Valley of the Fallen, a fascist/catholic mausoleum built by the slave labour of Republican prisoners, but only to a family tomb in Madrid alongside his vicious wife. The issue of the unmarked graves remains. The Bones in the Forest sets out the debate, on both sides, though there is no doubt where Michael Eaude stands, he presents an honest picture of events in the Civil War. It’s a good and worthwhile read.