Mark Oldfield - The Sentinel

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Some brilliance, some tedium

This is a mixture of a book - terrific in parts but with some serious flaws which get in the way of it being the excellent novel it could have been.

Three stories are told simultaneously. The central tale set in Madrid in 1953 is bleak, gripping and brilliant. The compelling central character is Guzman, an utterly unprincipled, self-serving torturer and murderer who directs a unit of secret police for Franco's repressive fascist dictatorship. The story is exceptionally well told, the atmosphere superbly conjured and the characters all horribly believable. There are also brief flashbacks to events in the Spanish Civil War during 1936, also well done and whose significance becomes clear late in the book.

Unfortunately, interspersed with these very good stories is a present-day tale of a forensic investigator and her two historian colleagues who are investigating Guzman's history and trying to piece together who he was and what happened in 1953. Sadly, I found this story trite, unconvincing and rather uninteresting. Mark Oldfield is trying to show parallels between Franco's truth-suppressing totalitarian regime and postmodernist historians who regard history as narrative with no objective truth, but an exercise in personal interpretation where the truth is just what you can persuade people to believe. Now, I regard this approach (and postmodernism in general) as a toxic intellectual pollutant, so I am absolutely in sympathy with Oldfield here - but, oh dear, it does go on. Plastic characters, endless indignation about oppressive attitudes, a silly plot...no matter how much I agreed with what was being said it was tedious and absurd, and it badly marred what could have been a really fine book.

I have given this four stars because the 1953 story was so good, but the modern one is two-stars at best. Frankly, I think you'd be best off skipping the present day bits: you'd miss almost nothing and could immerse yourself in a really good, informative and atmospheric historical thriller.