Wolf Moon
by Julio Llamazares
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
The scars of the Spanish Civil War, the
ensuing Francoist years, and the division fomented over the decades remain
unhealed and, every so often, still smart unexpectedly. Fiction is one way in
which this emotionally difficult topic can be approached – ironically, it can
be even more effective than history books in conveying the horrific legacy of
the conflict.
In this context, one of the key texts is Luna de Lobos, a sleek but punchy novel by Julio Llamazares, first published in 1985. It was issued by Peter Owen Publishers in an English translation by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles under the title Wolf Moon. Peter Owen’s catalogue was later acquired by Pushkin Press, which is now reissuing Wolf Moon in a new edition introduced by Benjamin Myers, as part of its attractive Pushkin Press Classics collection.
The novel is inspired by real-life events and recounts a game of cat and mouse between a group of four Republican rebels and Francoist forces. By the autumn of 1937, Ángel – the narrator – and his fellow Republicans have been driven into the mountains, where they eke out a meagre existence while evading the army’s regular raids.
Wolf Moon is divided into four chapters, each providing a snapshot of a specific year: 1937, 1939, 1943, and 1946. In his introduction, Myers presents the work as a pursuit novel in the tradition of John Buchan’s genre-defining The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male. It is certainly just as exciting and gripping, with some hair-raising night-time escapes and deadly chases. Yet it is also deeply poignant, especially when one considers that it is inspired by real events and by a real-life hero of the author, Casimiro Fernández Arias, for whom the novel serves as a memorial.
What I found particularly striking and
endearingly quirky is the sometimes overwrought imagery. The narrator is an
ex-schoolteacher who, one feels, might have been a writer with Romantic
inclinations had he not been forced into hiding. In Ángel’s account, the moon
sinks “like a rotten fruit”; in concealment, “the moon becomes your sun and the
sun becomes a memory”; mountains “balance precariously over the valley,
abandoned in the night like an imaginary ship.” These descriptions verge on the
baroque, yet they create a compelling contrast with the novel’s noirish,
thriller-like atmosphere. This is indeed a modern classic.
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