Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas review: 'masterly'

Javier Cercas | AFP via Getty Images

There is a certain genre of books – time was I remember it being called “faction” or “docufiction”– where the techniques of fiction are applied to real events. These books have space for the imagined, for a psychological probing and speculation that might be nigh impossible in non-fiction, but with a vexatious, fractious relationship with adherence to the facts, as far as they might be ever known. There are many that I have admired: Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Eric Vuillard’s The Order of the Day, Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov and I Am Alive And You Are Dead, plus A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš. They are also slightly different from books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song or John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which seem more like gonzo journalism in many ways. There is a more self-questioning and sceptical air to the European works that cannot be reduced to “based on a true story”.

This is especially true for Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean, first published in 2011 and now reissued with an epilogue, a kind of reconsideration. Cercas begins almost by flaunting the generic ambiguities. The second section states “How could I even dream of writing a fiction about the 23 February coup?” The book is an anatomy, a forensic deconstruction, almost a vivisection of those events.

The 23 February coup, in 1981, is a flashpoint moment, a genuine crux. Adolfo Suárez, the prime minister of Spain, is about to step down. He can be credited with the peaceful transition of Spain from the Franco dictatorship to democracy, even though his own story is rather more complex, as a former Falangist himself. A group of Franco loyalists, led by Colonel Tejero, storm the Spanish parliament and start shooting. Next to the suave Suárez are two other men: the head of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo and the conservative general who is nevertheless committed to the democratic process, Gutiérrez Mellado. Tejero is not a rogue agent, and part of the book’s Le Carré-like thrills is the gradual revelation of the co-conspirators. But there are two key things. The first is that the three men do not cower or hide or take cover: they face down the insurgents. The second, more importantly, is that all this was televised. It is difficult in an age after the 9/11 disaster to realise the shock of the live. It is strange to remember that this occurs only 20 years after Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”.

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Cercas is always alert to the evasions and omissions in the story. Talking about people’s “real memory” of it, he states “It is not: although the coup was broadcast live on radio, the television images were shown only after the liberation of the parliamentary hostages, shortly after 12.30 on the 24th and were seen live only by a handful of Televisión Española journalists and technicians… that’s what happened but we all resist having our memories removed…. It is, I suppose, a neurotic reaction, thought logical, especially considering the 23 February coup, in which it is often difficult to distinguish the real from the fictitious. After all, there are reasons to interpret the 23 February coup as the fruit of a collective neurosis. Or of collective paranoia. Or, more precisely, a collective novel”.

There are moments of exquisitely rendered detail, such as the nonchalant cigarette smoking during the hostage situation. The depictions of the psychologies of the principal actors is achieved well, even as it circles around the ambiguities. This is not, however, a perfect work. It is strangely repetitious. At one point, Suárez is compared to “Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, like Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré, like Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau”. But the same iteration comes not twice, or thrice, but four times. Quotes from Ortega y Gasset are replicated, and always paired with the same piece from Isaiah Berlin. Max Weber on the “politically sterile questions of past guilt” is cited several times. The descriptions of Suárez himself – errand boy, card sharp, illiterate – are trotted out again and again. There are variations on an elongated sentence such as “History fabricates strange figures, frequently resigns itself to sentimentalism and does not disdain the symmetries of fiction, as if it wanted to endow itself with meaning that on its own it did not possess”. As a reissue, it might have benefited from a re-edit as well.

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But the core of the book remains essential. Cercas writes about “the pact of forgetting” as a kind of white lie about the move from totalitarian to democratic government in Spain; and he is excoriating about it. It was not forgetting but “shelving, avoiding or setting aside the fact that those ultimately responsible for the war were those who won it”. The spectre of a vicious cycle of settling scores hovers over the book – Allan Massie had a similar sense of trying to understand, as in Vichy, what it is like to lose a war.

Though it can be at times slightly ponderous – “that Tejero’s ideals strike us as perverse and anachronistic does not qualify the goodness or evil of his intentions, because evil is often concocted from good and perhaps good from evil” – in its psychological wrestling with the characters it is masterly.

Anatomy of a Moment, by Javier Cercas, Fitzcarraldo Editions, £16.99. Javier Cercas is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 30 August.

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