“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” might be one of the most abused of William Faulkner’s lines. It does speak to something, though, when it comes to Spain, a country whose transition to democracy following 40 years of dictatorship came with a politics of appeasement and forgetting. Although this was necessary back then, it means that, 50 years on, initiatives such as exhuming the unnamed victims of Francisco Franco’s regime, or the removal of El Caudillo’s remains from the memorial he built to commemorate the fallen fascists, continue to be contested fiercely and weaponised for political gain.
Wolf Moon was originally published in 1985, just four years after another attempted coup rocked the newly formed parliament for a few hours. The novel appeared at a time when what came to be known as the Pacto del Olvido (the “pact of forgetting”) regarding the crimes of the regime was considered the price to pay to wipe the slate clean by the Spanish government.
And yet, as a story about anarco-syndicalist guerrillas who take to the Cantabrian mountains, Julio Llamazares’s first novel is notably rid of the “toxic sentimental fodder” that, according to the novelist Javier Cercas, has come to distinguish much revisionist literature coming in the wake of 2007’s Historical Memory Law, which acknowledged the victims of the Spanish Civil War. On the contrary, the novel’s myth-making relies on a form of hardboiled lyricism in which the heroics and romanticism of the fight against fascism are swapped for a primordial, brutish struggle for survival between man and landscape.
The novel covers a nine-year period by jumping between 1937, 1939, 1943 and 1946. At the beginning, we meet the narrator Ángel who, after the fall of the Northern Front, settles into clandestine life in the mountains and caves that surround his village. By 1946, when he decides to cross into France and leave his land behind, Ángel is the last man standing. In-between, he and his comrades Ramiro, Gildo and Juan effectively live as bandits, relying on robberies, blackmail and the villagers’ good will, while also being hounded by the police who are tasked with eliminating them, no matter the cost in men and resources.
Shootouts and ambushes punctuate the narrative. These face-offs are moments of excitement in a plot that primarily seeks to capture the everyday drudgery of living like “cornered animals”, holding out in an unforgiving landscape where letting your guard down could prove fatal.
The story opens on an autumn evening marked by the cold cierzo north wind, when a heavy rain from which the characters have sought refuge begins to subside. And the following pages see the four fugitives battle as much with the elements as with hostile guardias civiles and snitches, reacting to a rhythm determined more by changing seasons than events unfolding in Madrid, Barcelona or France.
There is perhaps something vaguely self-serving in the way Llamazares utilises the real-life figure of Casimiro Fernández Arias, a Republican guerilla who lived most of his life exiled in France. The author, a poet and travel writer hailing from a “ghost” village in rural León, finds inspiration in Arias’s story for Wolf Moon’s elegiac tale of young men holding on to a land that has turned its back on them. (At one point Ángel notes stoically: “It’s our attachment to this lifeless land – lifeless and hopeless – that weighs us down like a tombstone.”)
But in portraying partisan life in all its unvarnished ugliness, the novel works as an antidote to a kind of revisionism much more pernicious to the acritical exaltation of the resistance Cercas deplores: that is, the “bothside-ism” that muddies the water by saying that atrocities were committed by both camps. This kind of false equivalence seems to be particularly in vogue in Italy where direct memory of what fascism was like slowly fades into the background and laughable revanchist narratives take hold as a matter of right-wing state policy.
Through its reverse lyricism, Wolf Moon portrays war as the senseless business that it is. Still, it does so by never losing sight of who it is that stands on the right side of history.
Wolf Moon
Julio Llamazares, trs Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
Pushkin Press Classics, 192pp, £10.99
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[Further reading: Andrew O’Hagan’s ode to friendship]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Emperor