"Guernica": Novel creates a story behind a too-real tragedy

"Guernica"

by Dave Boling

Bloomsbury, 367 pp., $26

Recent headlines only reiterate what has been a litany of heartbreak and bloodshed over the past century. Political power plays and religious or ethnocentric chauvinism persist in incurring genocidal costs in human life across the globe from Darfur to Kosovo and from Cambodia to Auschwitz, to name only a tragic few.

And don't forget Guernica.

That name still bears special resonance because of the famous mural created by Pablo Picasso. He began working on it in Paris just days after hearing that the German Luftwaffe had, in the aid of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco's efforts to overthrow the Basque government, bombed Guernica, the village in northern Spain that for centuries had been a stronghold of Basque culture and democratic traditions.

In slashing strokes, Picasso painted a scene of chaos and fragmented anguish: a distorted bull, a terrified horse, a brutalized people.

He called the painting "Guernica."

And now a novel of the same name by Dave Boling revisits that time and place, and the sort of people who could have been living there on the day when horror suddenly rained down from the skies.

The bombing of Guernica occurred on April 26, 1937, but Boling takes readers back several decades before that to familiarize us with the Ansotegui family tree. We learn about the childhood of Justo Ansotegui and his two younger brothers.

We meet Mariangeles, who sees beyond Justo's rough exterior and gently persuades him to court her. And in due time, we watch their cherished daughter Miren grow to lovely young adulthood herself.

In fact, the first 100-plus pages of "Guernica" are a tone poem — a pastoral idyll only mildly impinged upon by goings-on beyond the mountains.

There is some sense of the repressive activities of Franco's Civil Guard, but nothing that significantly impairs the Ansoteguis' enjoyment of one another or of life in general.

The sudden arrival of a young man from the coast is seen as an opportunity, not an adumbration of danger. Handsome Miguel Navarro doesn't disclose the reasons for leaving his family's fishing village (he'd had to flee after having a run-in with Franco's men), but he seems to be a worthy candidate for Miren's affections. Their marriage bears more fruit for the family tree — soon the enchanting Catalina is born.

But this procession of generations, of strong, stouthearted men and lovely, independent women, begins to be afflicted by outside forces. Food shortages arise. Husbands and fathers get marched away under Franco's command. Suspicions grow among neighbors, and people start to keep to themselves.

And then in one devastating afternoon, the village is shattered in what is simply and cynically a German test of aerial warfare techniques.

Those who are left in the aftermath scarcely know where to begin picking up the pieces.

"Guernica" is Boling's first novel. A sports columnist for the News Tribune in Tacoma, he occasionally reverts to a didactic storytelling style, and his insertion of Picasso into the story isn't particularly artful.

But in his own way, with words instead of brushstrokes, Boling too paints a sprawling mural, a meditation on a family irrevocably disfigured by war.