'Sun, sex, secrets and a very uncivil war': Menorca, the Spanish Civil War and the pact of forgetting in Jo Eames’ The Faithless Wife

Abstract

[eng] This chapter revisits the recent output of Anglophone romantic fiction set during the Spanish Civil War in the context of claims for restorative justice and the recovery of historical memory and hoping to question the so-called “pact of forgetting” instituted in Spain after the Amnesty Law passed in 1977. This chapter focuses on Jo Eames' debut novel, The Faithless Wife (2010), set on the island of Menorca, exploring the effects of war and of Franco's dictatorship on the local population. The novel employs a double timeline and resorts to the recurrent trope of the contemporary female traveller who discovers love in the present time while investigating the atrocities of the war. The novel denies its characters the luxury of forgetting by forcing them to recover and reconstruct the hidden histories of the island during the conflict, while at the same time deflating its own status as an escapist beach read set on an exotic Mediterranean island, prompting its readers to engage simultaneously with the characters' predicaments and with the history of the island.