Lin Rose Clark reviews We Shall Pass, published by Luath Press, Edinburgh.
If you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed tale with strongly drawn characters and a dramatic plot, this book could well be for you. Set for the most part in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, We Shall Pass traces the steps of three very different characters as they grapple with family opposition, political commitment, love, loss and desperate physical danger.
Simon and Alice Sheridan are brother and sister; their father is General Sir Richard Sheridan, a pillar of the British military establishment and a friend of senior German Nazi Joachim Ribbentrop. It’s July 1936 and an attempted coup by Spanish generals, headed by Francisco Franco, threatens the elected government of Spain. Determined to join the Spanish people’s resistance to the generals, Simon Sheridan defies his father’s furious opposition and travels to Paris. There he meets Robbie Gillan, a working-class hunger marcher from Glasgow who is also on his way to Spain. Both continue to Albacete, where they are eventually organised into the International Brigades. In Albacete they also meet up with Alice Sheridan, a nurse, herself in Spain to help the republican side. She and Robbie, a forceful personality with ready fists and strong personal loyalties, have already met in London and are strongly attracted to each other. As the novel moves on, the reader gradually becomes aware that Simon, too, is in love with Robbie.
All three end up in Madrigueras, the town where the British Battalion of the XV International Brigade was formed and began its training in December 1936. Here we meet other characters, including the Welsh Jones brothers, who will have their own tragic storyline. Time moves quickly in some parts of this novel and within a few pages it’s February 1937 and the Battalion is going into battle at Jarama.
Without giving any spoilers, what follows is a series of bloody and intense military encounters at Jarama and elsewhere as the Spanish Civil War progresses. There are startling twists and turns for each of the three main protagonists and an eventual tragedy for one of them, but against this extraordinary setting the love story plays out, its intensity convincingly sharpened by the tensions and vicissitudes of war.
The author has anticipated that his readership may well wish to know more about the historical background and the Epilogue gives a compact summary of salient events with this in mind. On one level Clifford Thurlow has achieved a real page-turner with this novel; if in addition it succeeds in drawing readers into finding out more about the Spanish Civil War and what lay behind it, it will have achieved a worthy goal.
Lin Rose Clark is the author of
Swift Blaze of Fire: The Life of Robert Hilliard: Olympian, Cleric, Brigadista.
WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.
And all the Amazons – click HERE.
If you like to be completely drawn into a story and learn something as well, this is the book for you. You fall in love with the characters and come away with a good knowledge of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. What more could you want?