A writer who doesn't forget to remember

A novel by Spanish author Javier Cercas, set in the 1930s, got rid of ShaneHegarty's fuzzily romantic view of the country's civil war.

Before reading Soldiers Of Salamis by Javier Cercas, I knew pathetically little about the Spanish Civil War. I was scant on detail and high on fuzzy romanticism. I have long been fascinated by the second World War but took for granted the three-year war that preceded it, which has generally been interpreted as a straightforward clash of left and right, culture and barbarity.

With Soldiers Of Salamis, Cercas tackles the systematic ignorance that has blurred Spain's collective memory for more than half a century. His novel is a fictionalised version of a real event: Rafael Sánchez Mazas, the fascist poet who founded the Falangist movement, escaped from a firing squad in the war's final days. While hiding in the undergrowth, he was discovered, but spared, by a republican soldier. Mazas went on to find sanctuary with three deserting republicans - his "forest friends" - and the four waited for the imminent arrival of Franco's troops.

Yet it is also the tale of a writer, also called Javier Cercas, who bears only passing resemblance to the author and whose investigation of the story only vaguely mirrors the real Cercas's search. The novelisation of Cercas's hunt for an answer allows for a neater narrative conclusion and for a disarming irony and humour that act as bait for some of the book's profounder questions. The result is an original, provocative novel that reads as both journalistic thriller and meditation on the Spanish psyche.

I interviewed Cercas in Dublin and found him to be as lively, enthusiastic and enlightening as his novel. He has such disregard for ego that, after recreating himself in the novel as a neurotic, self-pitying wreck, he was unperturbed that the film version changed the sex of his character. He was also fascinated with what Mazas represented as an artist. "Is it possible to be a son of a bitch but also to be a good writer?" he asked. "This is a big question."

History and art have declared the Spanish Civil War an absolute victory for the fascists but a moral, artistic and cultural victory for the republicans. The fascists won the war, explained Cercas, but they lost the literature. That the republicans have been romanticised neither alters history nor brings back the dead.

He described his novel as "the revenge of history". Even the heroes of the Left have been ignored. The stories of the forest friends had been nothing but dull old men's tales to their children until Cercas's book made journalists desperate to hear them from the men who lived this story.

In its original form, as Soldados De Salamina, the novel has sold 500,000 copies and prised open a topic closed for discussion for more than 50 years. The post-war generation grew up in silence. So their children grew up in ignorance.

Which freed me to admit my own naivety. Soldiers Of Salamis sent me off in search of information, and there was a period of the year when histories of the Spanish Civil War became my bedtime reading. I also found an interesting companion book in one of my other highlights of the year, Gerard Donovan's devastating Schopenhauer's Telescope, another novel set at a massacre.

I now hear echoes of Soldiers Of Salamis in news reports from Spain. An organisation there called the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory is planning to disinter the body of Federico García Lorca, the poet executed by fascists at the beginning of the war and the Left's most potent martyr. A relative of another victim said that "the fascists won the war, but we are winning the battle for memory". Although it mirrored Cercas's assertion, it was more boast than observation. Soldiers Of Salamis refuses to engage in such battles. It is an attempt at understanding, but it passes no judgment.

Its sympathies may ultimately lie with the republicans, but it is curious about the motives behind both the good and the evil acts of war and the people behind them, who have been subsumed by history. It is a book not of answers but of questions that you feel compelled to investigate further. It is a novel that also has great resonance in Irish historical and cultural memory. Soldiers Of Salamis might be set in Spain, but its themes are universal and, in the case of our own history, worryingly recognisable.