Review: FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls is at once a love story, a compelling novel of the Spanish Civil War, and a grave and sombre tragedy of Spanish peasants fighting for their lives. But above all it is about death. The plot is simple, about a bridge over a deep gorge behind Franco's lines. Robert Jordan, a young American International Brigader, is ordered to blow up the bridge. He must get help from the guerrillas who live in Franco's territory. The bridge must be destroyed at the precise moment when a big Loyalist offensive begins. If the bridge can be destroyed, the offensive may succeed. If the offensive succeeds, the struggle of the human race against fascism may be advanced a step. The courage of the Spanish peasants is linked to the fate of all mankind. These Spaniards know they may be killed. Jordan senses it when he hears the orders. The general senses it when he gives them. So does Pablo, the pig-eyed, cunning guerrilla leader, when Jordan asks his help. So does Pilar, his big, ugly, wise, foul-mouthed wife. Pilar is a gypsy: she reads doom in Jordan's palm. She smelt death-to-come on the last dynamiter who went through, and he was killed. The greatness of this book is the greatness of these people's triumph over their foreknowledge of death-to-come if they blow up the bridge. Jordan goes through with it because he is intellectually convinced that he is helping to defeat fascism. Pilar goes through with it because she is part of the revolution and cannot stop. Pablo's strong instinct to live makes him desert at the last moment and destroy the detonator. Then he, too, realizes in his own way that "no man is an iland." He cannot stand the loneliness of desertion, returns to help dynamite the bridge.