Underground is a novel about one man’s journey from the battlefields of the Somme to the Spanish Civil War. The story of Albert Fraser begins in that first war and then moves into the squalor and strife of the 1930s in Canada. Battle-scarred, he searches for an answer to the question, Who am I? and, in a seemingly rash and contradictory act, returns to war.

The details:

Sixteen-year-old Albert Fraser believes that enlisting in the First World War will make him a man. But a shell blast that buries him alive in a trench shatters his identity, instead.

Al emerges from the war with a driving need to act. Back home in Vancouver — with rising shrapnel in his flesh and nightmare images in his head — he works to keep busy. When the Great Depression hits, he rides the rails and scrabbles for jobs. After an accidental act of violence, he hides below the streets of Chinatown, and then heads north. With no place to call home he seems destined to wander aimlessly. But when the Spanish Civil War erupts, he seeks out Picasso’s Guernica and sees in the painting a reflection of what had been done to him, and what his life has become. Now, under a new name, he travels to Spain, a soldier once more, to reclaim all he has lost — or to die trying.

Both love story and social commentary, Underground examines the timeless human conditions of passion, conflict and hope. In its depiction of labour, from swinging picks on a Canadian mountainside to wielding scythes in a Spanish rye field, it is also a celebration of work and of the camaraderie of workers.

What inspired Underground:

According to family legend, my father’s father was buried alive in a trench at the Somme. He dug his way to the top and punched a fist through the mud, hoping for rescue. To me, that fist was a symbol of defiance. It said: I will not die. Then a co-worker told me about her father who served in Spain as a member of Canada’s MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion, the Mac-Paps. All I knew of that conflict was what I had learned from reading Ernest Hemingway. I knew nothing of any Canadians in Spain–except, of course, for Norman Bethune, famous for his temper as well as his blood transfusion unit. Curious, I headed to the library, where I found that the salute of the international soldier in Spain was a raised fist, a symbol of resistance against fascism. A lightning bolt of ideas began crackling between those two raised fists. Could a man who fought in one war have also fought in the other? And why would he, having gone through the horrors of that first war? Underground is my attempt to answer that question. 

Underground was released in March 2009, just before for the 70th anniversary of the Fall of Madrid, an event that marked the end of the Spanish Civil War. For more information see Cormorant Books.

The fight against fascism in Spain became one of the greatest rallying cries of a generation, and yet the 1,700 who volunteered from this country are Canada’s forgotten soldiers. One quarter of them died in Spain, but they are seldom named at Remembrance Day ceremonies and are given only scant reference in school texts. Only four works of non-fiction have been written about Canada’s volunteers. The latest is Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War by Michael Petrou.

For more information about the Spanish Civil War, including photographs, see Shots of War: Photojournalism During the Spanish Civil War.