The Shadow of the Wind review by Josh

The Shadow of the Wind is a Gothic mystery set in Barcelona between roughly 1919 and 1955. The story opens in 1945, when Daniel Sempere—then ten years old—is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library of banned and neglected works. Daniel chooses a novel titled The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. He is immediately captivated, and soon discovers that the author disappeared under mysterious circumstances and that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of his books.

The next four hundred pages unfold as a beautifully constructed detective story. Daniel gradually uncovers the secrets of Carax’s life while becoming entangled in parallel mysteries—and a romance—of his own.

The plot really accelerates around 1950, when Daniel, now sixteen, meets Fermín Romero de Torres, a homeless man whom Daniel and his father help get back on his feet. While most of the adults in the novel urge Daniel to abandon his amateur sleuthing, Fermín encourages him. Together, they begin piecing together what truly happened to Carax.

What follows here is less a review than some historical context that other readers may find helpful.

Barcelona in this period is an ideal setting for a Gothic mystery. When Daniel was born, the city was part of the Autonomous Region of Catalonia under Spain’s Second Republic. When he was just a year old, a military coup triggered the Spanish Civil War. By 1939 - thanks in large part to the support of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany - Francisco Franco had taken his place alongside Mussolini and Hitler as a leader of Europe’s fascist right. Fortunately for both Spain and the Allies, Franco declined to formally join the Axis powers.

By 1945, the other fascist regimes had been destroyed: their leaders were dead, their governments dismantled, and the Allies had begun what would become extensive programs of denazification and reeducation. Fascism seemed to have been wiped from the map, leaving communism and capitalism to confront each other in the emerging Cold War. This left Franco’s Spain in an awkward position. For several years it was an international pariah: excluded from the United Nations (1946), shunned diplomatically as many countries withdrew their ambassadors, and even temporarily cut off by France, which closed its border.

This isolation was a serious inconvenience for Franco’s regime, but not an existential threat—thanks in part to the Brigada Político-Social, Spain’s political police. The force was modeled directly on the Gestapo and trained by German officers. The police play a central role in the novel: the psychopathic Inspector Fumero, the book’s main antagonist, is repeatedly praised by the authorities for his “excellent service.”

The Shadow of the Wind is not a political novel, but politics constantly intrude. Daniel’s love interest, Bea, is engaged to a soldier who “wasted no opportunity to lecture people on the genetic and spiritual superiority of the Spanish people and the imminent decline of the Bolshevik empire.” Daniel is warned to stay away from Fermín because “he’s an anarchist, a Mason, or a Jew at the very least.” Later still, Daniel receives his army conscription letter, informing him that:

“I, Daniel Sempere, would have the honor and pride of fulfilling the most sacred and edifying duty that could befall an Iberian male: to serve the Motherland and wear the uniform of the national crusade for the defense of the spiritual bulwark of the West… [against the] Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.”

Franco’s rhetoric about a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy threatening Spain was not very different from that of fascist regimes in Germany or Italy. The crucial difference was context: Spain had not had a significant Jewish population for over four hundred years. Nevertheless, the regime was openly antisemitic. After the defeat of Nazi Germany—and as the extent of the Holocaust became known—Franco began to soften overt antisemitic language in order to rehabilitate Spain internationally. Official rhetoric shifted toward Catholicism, “traditional values,” and anti-communism. Communists and Freemasons largely replaced Jews as the regime’s designated enemies, at least in public discourse.

Perhaps the most important difference between Spanish fascism and its German counterpart was the central role of the Catholic Church. Like elsewhere in Europe, the Church’s power had declined sharply by the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the Spanish state had confiscated most of the Church’s vast landholdings, and under the Second Republic Spain appeared to be on the path toward a modern, secular state. Franco reversed that trajectory. He declared Catholicism the official state religion, banned public worship by other faiths, restored Church control over education and marriage, and granted it a major role in state censorship.

This is the backdrop against which the novel unfolds. It is not far removed from the world of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrin