Wider concerns are also insistent in Bryson’s new novel, To the Death, Amic, which focuses on another family living in Barcelona in 1936, and inevitably caught up in the anti-Franco struggle of the Spanish Civil War. But since Bryson himself draws no parallels, nor even hints at any, let us see how this novel engages an audience not pre-titillated by the tapas of scandal and speculation.

Why might anyone be interested in the Spanish Civil War these days? We have been told by our own Prime Minister to keep our eyes fastened on Asia and by implication to forget any vestigial delusions regarding the relevance of Europe. And secondly, if we remember anything at all about that painful episode in Iberian history, it is to recall that the opposition were all Reds, and received in defeat the deserved fate of all would-be socialists. Indeed, the main interest of that Civil War was perhaps that it anticipated the recent demise of socialism and achieved, thanks to its great General, the right-wing stability apparently now sought by most of Europe – Western, Central, and Eastern. It might even remind us of the foolishness of entertaining the idea of a Republic.

But, as the novel tells us more than once, ‘Mine is never the only game on the board’. The left-wing opposition to the forces of fascism in Spain was no monolith; they might have been more successful had they not been dispersed amongst factions adhering to a spread of heroes dead and alive. In Barcelona there were loyalties to Marx, to Stalin, to Trotsky, to the Republican President of separatist Catalonia, and to anarchism. In fact, the life and philosophy of the Catalan anarchist Enric Torres i Barbo, Henry the Bourbon, is, we are told in the only authorial clue to the provenance of the novel, its guide.

Its background is the period when the Left had won the first and third of the Spanish elections held after the departure of the last King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, and Catalonia had declared itself an independent Republic; when there were for the first time free secular schools open to all children, equality of married women with their husbands, legal workers’ unions, and a Catalan national anthem. Some farmworkers took matters further, abolishing private ownership of land and ploughing from dawn until dusk the fields of absentee landlords. Barcelona was even host in 1936 to a dissenters’ Olympic Games. The official Olympiad was to be held in Hitler’s Berlin, but ‘to Barcelona came the roll call of European exile: Italians fled from Mussolini in 1922, Austrians from Dollfuss in ‘32, Portugese from Salazar in ‘33’. The Catalonian counter-games were predictably as great a failure as Melbourne’s bid, although no one at the time thought the coincidence of the fascist uprising was anything more than accidental.

All of this, and what followed, is recounted as memoir, the recollections of an old man, whose name happened to be Enric and whose mother was a banished Catalan Barbo, or Bourbon. In 1936 ten-year-old Enric and his twin brother Josep were the younger sons of an anarchist papa, secretary to the Tailors’ Union, and a devout but not simple mama, born in a street of bordellos and plying a seamstress’s trade. Papa and mama live separately, the better perhaps for papa to indulge the ladies who seek his favours, but also so that he can play his political games without endangering the family he loves. Gradually his sons are drawn in to his network of undercover activities, first Amou, the older brother, and then Enric and Josep, whose confusing identical features make them useful couriers. They work alongside the Basque priest who abjures the official church, smugglers from the Pyrenees with their own agenda, even nuns from Saint Pau who abandon their veils and let their hair grow while they nurse wounded Catalans.

Despite the multitudinous intrigues that abound, the novel has little plot. The twins fulfil a mission or two without being quite in the know while the tide of war pitches and tosses them all around. But the novel’s steady progress towards its end is paralleled by the inexorable advance of the fascist guns, which come close enough to bombard Barcelona, and isolate and starve the inhabitants. Papa forges passports, mama prays harder and concocts a Christmas dinner of fishheads and lentils. Papa, whose name is on a list, is forced to cross the border to France, but the twins reject the passports he had provided, and at the last minute elect to stay in Spain.

It is important that they, and we, understand that they are in no way superior to their father. They are proud of him, sure of his redemption, and love him despite their different paths. History inevitably dictates the end of this story, but fortunately has no jurisdiction over its several messages. There is one lesson for those who exclude the past from their understanding of the present, another for those who fail to pay attention to the minute folds and pleats of the human fabric.

A third is the significance of style and craft in the construction of a text, the sifting and selectivity that ensure the appropriateness and precision of each word. This is a book that deserves above all respect – both for its unfashionable values of recollection and reminder, and for the vehicle through which they are voiced.