Castro's Dream
Lucy Wadham Faber and Faber, 272pp, £14.99
ISBN 0571216374
Rather disconcertingly, this second novel has nothing to do with Cuba. Instead, it is a tense saga of love and betrayal set in the Basque country of northern Spain. Two sisters, Lola and Astrid, return to the region to await the release of Lola's lover, Mikel, a terrorist who has served 20 years in prison. The journey at the same time forces them to re-examine their claustrophobic love for each other.
Mikel, it transpires, has been wooing Astrid from his prison cell; she has encouraged his advances. The theme of betrayal resonates throughout the novel; other characters commit betrayals and are themselves betrayed. Mikel is accused of betraying the movement for which he went to prison. He is, in turn, then betrayed by those for whom he has given up 20 years of his life.
As the sisters journey to Spain from their Paris home, a second-generation Arab immigrant, Kader, also embarks on a journey of a different kind - towards maturity. Believing that the south of France will deliver him from racism and unemployment, he leaves a bleak housing estate in Paris in search of a new life in Marseilles. As he hitches south, wounded from a knife attack carried out before he even left Paris, he is picked up by Astrid, who binds his wound. There is an immediate intimacy between them; Kader gives up trying to reach Marseilles and instead begins to pursue her. He offers the non-judgemental affection of a man only just emerging from boyhood.
Wadham's first novel, Lost, was about the search for an abducted child, and described the intensity of the parent-child bond as successfully as any other novel of recent years. In contrast, Castro's Dream is about the need to escape from childhood. In terms of age, Astrid and Lola are fully mature, but psychologically they haven't progressed much beyond childhood.
Castro's Dream is, among other things, a bitter indictment of terrorism and its propensity to corrupt the soul, no matter how noble its intentions. Wadham shows how the movement for greater freedom for the Basques has disintegrated at the moment of its apparent success. Self-government in the region has left the men of violence in charge; they flounder as they attempt to adjust to their new role. Their struggle is merely shown to have migrated inwards, becoming the dream of Wadham's most sympathetic characters to live a "simple life", free of brutality.
Mikel, we are told, once said that the price paid for seeking involvement with people who "play around with death . . . was the experience of fear". Mikel thinks that it is possible to prevent this fear leading him into old patterns of violence. He is proved wrong, with fatal consequences.
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