Itโs all Batmanโs fault. I was nine, and he was fighting a new foe called โThe Bookwormโ, played by Roddy McDowell, who did book-related crimes. Most of the plot hinged on the fact that Batman not only knew the plot of For Whom the Bell Tolls and could anticipate Bookwormโs next move but knew that the title was a quotation from an Elizabethan poem and used this to thwart the cliffhanger with Robin about to be blown up. I decided that this was how Grown Ups did things (an opinion later confirmed by the Target novelisation Doctor Who and the Green Death, where the meaning and origin on โSerendipityโ was significant). So, I thought, when Iโm a grown up Iโll read Ernest Hemingway. Look, it was the seventies.
By the eighties the reputation of Papa Hemingway was a bit dented and anyone seen reading anything of his was hounded by the Right-Ons. Alan Bennett started it by having him supposedly say when I reach for my gun I hear the word โCultureโ. Now, despite recent attempts to make his glamorous early life seem interesting independently of anything he wrote, Hemingwayโs almost vanished. You canโt imagine that Christian Baleโs Batman has ever read him (although itโs unlikely heโd read anything that isnโt an instruction manual for a laser-guided RPG.) There are lots of people who like many of his other works, especially his short stories, but canโt stand this one. Others think that this is his only halfway-decent book (โdecentโ as regards quality โ thereโs sex and violence and badly-translated swearing, and this is the book that gave the world โDid the Earth move for you?โ). For all the bullfighting and drinking and the whole cult of machismo Hemingwayโs followers built around him heโs an observant and deft writer. Humourless, yes; ruthlessly self-disciplined about adjectives or modifiers, undeniably; heโs the equivalent of a detox diet for anyone thinking about writing. The whole of The Old Man and the Sea has fewer adjectives than a page of Ray Bradbury. He writes like that on purpose, a necessary step after the Nineteenth Century American โgreatsโ. Trouble is, this book does other things with language that arenโt as helpful, especially when trying to convey idiomatic Spanish.
The plotโs simple enough: Robert Jordanโs gone to Spain to fight in the Civil War there, so is sent to blow up a bridge to stop the Fascists getting through. One of his colleagues tries to sabotage this and the plan goes wrong. Whatโs more interesting is the idea that people who believe in absolutes have more in common with others who believe different absoluties than with ordinary people. Jordan moves away from adolescent, linear, black-and-white distinctions over the four days of this book. A lot else is going on under the surface of this storyline. Hemingway makes small details do the work of whole paragraphs of description and hints at insights Robert has during this intense โ and probably final โ few hours.
By Tat Wood