posted on 15 Jan 2021

The Broken Root by Arturo Barea

Spanish journalist, Arturo Barea was a Republican sympathiser who found himself in self-imposed exile after the Franco regime seized power – he had been both a volunteer in the Republican militia  and started broadcasting to Europe when Madrid came under siege. He was never a member of the Communist Party and so came under suspicion as the civil war escalated and in 1938 he decided to leave for France, moving on to take up residence in the UK where he lived out the rest of his life, dying in 1957 at the age of 60.

He spent time working for the BBC World Service and I’m guessing that this may have been where he met George Orwell, who came to think very highly of Barea’s literary skills. Reviewing one of Barea’s volumes of autobiography he said of Barea that he was “one of the most valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a result of Fascist persecution.”

Barea is probably best known (if he is known at all) for his three part autobiography that goes under the collective title of The Forging of a Rebel which collected plenty of positive reviews from his contemporaries outside Spain in the years between 1941 and 1946 when they were first published. Inside Spain, however, his work went unpublished until 1978.

The Broken Root was Barea’s only novel, first published in the UK in 1951, and is really a fictionalised extension of the autobiographies. It’s a book that deals with what kind of society Spain becomes in the early years after Franco’s takeover and, as such, is imbued with the spirit of exile – a book by an outsider who used to be an insider.

It’s ten years after the end of the civil war an exiled Republican, Antolin Moreno returns to Spain from his home in England to try and re-establish some kind of link with the wife and children he left behind. But in that ten years, Moreno has built a new life, become a British citizen and as a result he struggles to adapt to the new Spain he discovers. His family has changed too – his two sons and his daughter have grown into very different people. The one son has become a petty criminal and pimp who has adopted a Falangist identity in order to operate freely on the black market while the other has become a dogmatic Communist, working underground with the ineffectual and shattered ‘reds’. His daughter has become a fey hypochondriac who has deeply invested in the Catholic church while, at the same time, his wife has run into the arms of spiritualist charlatans.

All of them – and the wider community he used to live in – have their own expectations of Moreno and what his return should mean to them. He also finds himself torn between the new life he has created elsewhere and the expectations of his past and his culture. In the end a tragedy of sorts plays itself out – a storyline that I’m not going to reveal here in case you want to read it for yourself – but it’s more the tragedy of Spain itself than of one family or one individual.

In a review by Kirkus, published in 1951, they found the book an impressive effort:

“ The action is fast, compelling, the glimpses of government graft, black shirt brutality, general poverty unforgettable, and the characters writhe out of the story like damned souls. “

However I have to say that I was less impressed. As a novel I found it to be rather crudely structured. Each of the characters becomes a cipher or symbol of some aspect of the new Spain and the behaviour and activities of each allows Barea to construct a, sometimes plodding, mini morality tale about the economy or religion or political corruption – and so on.

Moreno himself is so torn over his identity and what he wants from life that he essentially becomes passive for long stretches of the narrative in ways that test credibility – a man forged in the fires of war and exile finds himself essentially a victim.

Barea’s intension here was certainly to highlight what Franco’s fascist regime had done to the country and people he loved and the idea of sending an exile back to his home to act as witness would have worked better, I think, in the hands of a more skilled novelist. It’s a story that needed someone capable of rising above the didactic and using the material to create a more potent analysis of what they encounter - something that would transcend the autobiographical.

Copies on the second hand market aren’t too easy to find and you’ll pay from £10-£30 for one. There doesn’t seem to be a current paperback of this title in print.

 

Terry Potter

January 2021