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An epigraph to a novel is the first hello, a quick handshake to welcome the reader into the story. I’m reasonably certain that many readers quickly flip past it to the Prologue or Chapter 1 without paying much note; they are, after all, words whose context is yet to be revealed.

In the course of researching my novel Guernica, I came upon three quotes to use in the epigraph that actually served as guideposts for me as a writer trying to capture the atmosphere of a place over time.

The first was from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘Guernica is the happiest town in the world… governed by an assembly of countrymen who meet under an oak tree and always reach the fairest decisions.’ I kept Rousseau’s quote in mind as I described a pastoral, almost idyllic, early setting in which the characters are common people enjoying their colorful traditions and proud heritage. Their lives were difficult and they faced oppression, but they still carried a 19th Century rural naivete until the point when the 20th Century was savagely thrust upon them.

The second quote was taken by Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm: ‘Guernica was… an experimental horror.’ Experimental horror. Perfect in its insight and poetic brevity.

Having been married to a woman of Basque descent, I had for many years heard stories about the tragedy that was the 1937 bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. In those years, I had come to admire her Basque relatives as hard-working, family-oriented people with great pride in their history. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, I was sensitive to the fact that no one examining the history of such terrorist assaults on defenseless civilians bothered to trace it back to the bombing of Guernica, a time when these horrors were still ‘experimental.’

It became clear to me that the bombing of Guernica, at least to contemporary Americans, had slipped from the collective awareness. As a journalist, I considered re-examining it as one of the great tragedies of the 20th Century. As I researched, I discovered a number of very fine histories and non-fiction books on the topic. I didn’t see that I could add much in that regard. But a piece of fiction, perhaps a story that could put a face on the victims, would attract the reader, whose awareness might be elevated as a by-product.

I talked to Basque relatives; I traveled to Spain and France several times for research; I studied dozens of historical accounts. Reports from witnesses were still compelling and emotional nearly 70 years after the event. But it was while reading some histories that I came across one item that absolutely forced me to write the book.

In the aftermath of the bombing, a number of victims arrived at surgeons with hands that had been mutilated. These horrible wounds had been self-inflicted – these people had been so dedicated to digging loved ones out of jagged rubble that they continued past the point where the flesh had been torn from their fingers and hands. After reading about those brave people, writing the novel went from being a diversion to an obligation.

The third epigraph quote is from Pablo Picasso describing his motives for painting his mural Guernica. It ends with the clause ‘I express my abhorrence of the race that has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.’ Although Picasso and his mural were not directly attached to the plot that drives the main characters in the novel, I thought it was important that some fictionalisation of him be included as cultural context.

In my original manuscript, Picasso and Francisco Franco were fully examined characters, with sections that probed their personal histories and tried to get inside their minds to discover what led them to have lives that somehow intersected that April day in 1937. But at 600 pages, that version was considered too lengthy to market for a first-time novelist. Franco’s segments were cut to leave him mostly as an off-screen menace.

Picasso was trimmed considerably, but I argued to leave at least a thread of him in the book because he provided a helpful plot connection when his mural appeared at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, and he supplied a stunningly appropriate quote to a Nazi soldier that I wanted to use in the final segment before the Epilogue.

So, I’ve had readers ask me about the mechanics of shaping a book that takes characters from happy to horrified to outraged to vengeful. I’m always tempted to say: it’s right there at the front of the book in those epigraph quotes. They helped tell the story.

Further reading...

Guernica
by Dave Boling
Picador
Buy now
 

Meet the rest of Waterstone’s New Voices 2009: Matthew Plampin, Jenn Ashworth, Patrick deWitt. Francesca Kay, Amanda Smyth, Catherine Hall, Dave Boling, Richard Millward, Mari Strachan. Janice Lee, Anthony Quinn and Yiyun Li

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