Winter In Madrid
By C J Sansom
A new author to me. I’d picked up his book Sovereign with which I had quickly become enamoured, and I resolved to work through his others in short order.
Winter In Madrid is the only one that Sansom has written so far that stands alone; it’s not set in the times of Henry VIII like his others. This one occurs in Spain during its civil war, its roots lying in a military uprising funded by Juan March in 1936.
As far as we’re concerned, the chief character is Harry Brett. We flash back to his youth at Rookwood, a private school, where he has two close friends. One is Bernie Piper, a working-class boy there on a scholarship who has communist leanings. The other is Sandy Forsyth, son of a vicar and a bit of a bad boy who has a prediliction for unearthing fossils.
Sandy eventually gets himself removed from school, taking advantage of Harry’s inadvertent lapse in telling him of a teacher’s morbid fear of worms. The teacher had caned Sandy, so Sandy put worms in his shoes, which caused horrors, the creatures bringing back images to the teacher of worms on corpses from WW1. That just left Harry and Bernie.
Years later, they’ve lost touch. Bernie is off fighting in Spain, one of the communist brotherhood, gets shot, and is reported missing, presumed dead. Harry is a lecturer in Cambridge, when he is called to an interview.
It turns out that he is needed to work as a spy in Madrid. A certain Sandy Forsyth is over there, presumably up to no good, and the secret service wants Harry to gain his trust. Officially, he’s to be a translator at the British Embassy.
Over he goes. Before too long, he sees an old friend in the street. It’s Bernie’s girlfriend, Barbara Clare. They had met several years before when Bernie and Harry visited Spain. She tells him that Bernie’s presumed dead, and that she is now with Sandy Forsyth, though they aren’t actually married.
It turns out that Bernie is held in a camp, and word reaches Barbara, courtesy of a British journalist. She gets involved in a plot to have him ‘escape’, offering money to a guard’s brother. Meanwhile, Harry is getting into a relationship of his own. Being Madrid, there are spies everywhere, and the man following Harry is particularly poor at it. One day Harry goes to visit old friends, only to find a ghost town, starving dogs patrolling it. The leader of the pack goes for Harry, but a quick shot convinces them to leave him alone. Not so someone else; hearing cries a few seconds later, Harry turns to see his spy being mauled. He saves him, and takes him to his family, expressing the desire to pay for the medical bills. He meets the spy’s sister, Sofia. She’s cold with him but as Harry pops back more and more often to check on her brother, they begin to grow closer, eventually agreeing to elope.
By this point, Harry has ‘by chance’ met with his old friend Sandy, who has invited Harry to join a scheme in goldmining. We later find out that this was all a fraud; Sandy has been deliberately tainting soil samples, melting down gold from French jews that he’s smuggling abroad and showing the gold-laced samples to people who would buy the land from him. He’s a nasty piece of work, bullying Barbara and carrying on an affair with his housekeeper. He knows all about Barbara’s plan to liberate Bernie, since he listens to her phone conversations and has a spare key to her desk.
He makes it his plan to ruin everything for them, heading to the meeting place to kill Bernie. As it happens, Bernie hears something so doesn’t go to the arranged point, since it could be police for all he knows. Forsyth flees when Barbara pulls a gun on him; it turns out that he didn’t actually have one.
Sofia is gunned down by the police and Bernie injured. Somehow, they make it back to the embassy. Several years later, Barbara travels to England to catch up with the middle-aged Harry. They’re both single; Harry’s never gotten over Sofia, and Bernie eventually died in WW2. Barbara is translating for an Argentine delegation who is flying over to discuss business. The last man off the plane looks familiar: it’s Sandy Forsyth, and so ends the book.
I want to like this book, I really do. It’s a somewhat impausible plot, all these people who know one another and just happen to meet in Spain, but that shouldn’t prove the problem. If the book went 300 pages instead of 530, I think it would likely be a fair read, but there was too much padding in this one. There are flashbacks that don’t really seem to mean anything, and there is an entire side thread with Bernie in the camp that is rather dull.
I’d recommend an abridged version, certainly, but this one is too long and drawn out to be something that I’d suggest to a friend, which is a shame.
Tags: C. J. Sansom