A writer at his masterful best
THE CLASSICS In the first of a short series in which he examines enduring tales, Micheal Fanning gets to grips with an epic of the Spanish civil war
Sunday October 25 2009
For Whom the Bell Tolls
THIS is a Penguin edition of 444 pages I read over four to six weeks. I read the last 250 pages within a 24-hour period in Co Galway, the final 100 pages while I sat in Thoor Ballylee Park, Yeats' tranquil four-storey Norman castle where he settled with his wife, George, near Gort, Co Galway.
For Whom The Bell Tolls is Hemingway's masterful work -- a story of war and its cruelties, of rape, murder, men and women at their best and worst, of cowardice and of bravery. It is also an examination of love, true love, suicide and death.
Hemingway employs gripping dialogue in the vernacular language in telling this fantastic, breath-taking story with an obscure ending.
Does the protagonist, Robert Jordan, Ingles the dynamiter, survive -- or will he be summarily executed in this horrific civil war where people on both sides kill and are killed with impunity? Along the way we read of beheadings, townspeople being flung from a high cliff in the Sierras to a river thousands of feet below and of rape as a military revenge. Robert Jordan and Maria, the beautiful war orphan who has been traumatised and raped by the Nationalists before she meets Robert, fall in love. There is a lyrical account of their affair where we see Hemingway at his best as a poet.
Pilar, the female protagonist, is Maria's minder and helps the young girl to recover. Pablo is Pilar's crazed, bloodthirsty thug of a husband who suffers no remorse for any of his crimes. Not much love exists between Pablo and Pilar, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after their acts of heinous violence.
Finally, the Republicans blow the bridge and the guerillas scramble to retreat from the battlefield and it ends leaving us to wonder who survives the action. Will Robert Jordan take his own life? Probably not, as he lies almost exsanguinated, secondary to an angulated fractured femur.
Overhead the Republican and Nationalist planes fly in and bomb the frontline, as a jet flies in over peaceful Thoor Ballylee of millboards and sea-green slates.
The river water flows noisily as I read this powerful book's final line. "He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."
- MICHAEL FANNING
Sunday Independent
