The plethora of great current narrators of historical fiction in Spain is configured around a diversity of feathers that come from historical academic training or art in many cases. But we also find great writers of this type of fiction from the autodidacticism of the writer without further conditioning, of the one who delves into the historical legacy to present interesting novels about the past.
In one way or another the point is that the historical novel is very much alive thanks to writers like Santiago Posteguillo, Jose Luis Corral o louis clog on the one hand, along with others like Javier Negrete, Slav Galán or even the very Arturo Perez Reverte with its powerful historical settings towards the biggest bestseller.
Jose Calvo Poyato, whom we bring up today in this space, is one of the narrators with that erudite background of the doctorate in the matter. But it is also that this historian (who was also a front-line politician and who never stopped being a writer), knows how to find the suggestive plot, the intrahistoric appeal, the real character full of new nuances to discover.
And it is that historical fiction is capable of housing all kinds of narrators about such disparate events of our evolution as a civilization from one side of the world to the other.
The case of José Calvo Poyato, with a work of around 30 publications between fiction and popularization (without forgetting that alter ego Peter harris, to whose signature he delivers the works most associated with that historical suspense that points to the conspiracy as a literary hook), lately he has been taking the paths of a historical fiction with that aftertaste of mystery that involves the reader.
Novels with the hook of the bestsellers but always with that rigor of the doctor in the matter, a true luxury that always satisfies readers in search of that entertainment balanced with the search for knowledge about any passage in history.
Top 3 recommended books by José Calvo Poyato
The king's spy
I have first selected a recent novel in which the writer's craft overflows in each chapter, in each scene, in each dialogue.
In many moments of history after the decline of the Spanish Empire (back in the XNUMXth century), it seems (when it is not rigorously verifiable) as if the world behind the Pyrenees was always idling with respect to the rest of a Western Europe embarked on continuous advances.
The contrast is most palpable in this novel by Poyato in which we go from lustrous (with the first black smoke of industrialization) London of the eighteenth century to Madrid in which picaresque still seems the essential philosophy of life, despite the fact that the flashes of the Enlightenment seemed to want to seep into the bull hide. However, the old empire still dreams of avenging its insults against perfidious Albion.
A sailor like Jorge Juan travels to England to participate in the naval advances of the moment, burying his interest in gathering information for Spain in an action parallel to his simple presence as an official envoy.
Without a doubt one of the first spies in history. Along with this adventure we discover the last political hope of the country, the Riojan Marqués de la Ensenada tries to hatch a plan parallel to the actions of Jorge Juan for, almost backwards, Fernando VI. A plan that includes political maneuvers in which to take advantage of the confrontation between France and England.
Blood in the street of the Turk
General Prim and the character of Fernando Besora share their hometown: Reus. And a story revolves around these two characters in one of the most interesting moments in the history of Spain that dates back to the XNUMXth century.
For much of the XNUMXth century, General Prim stood out as a leading figure, first in the military and later in the political sphere.
Undoubtedly it was a character with a progressive vision around whose life, although in a parallel way, the vital space of the other character that makes up the rich mosaic of history advances, the aforementioned countryman Fernando Besora.
The political tensions of the moment advance as Besora seeks her space as a writer, chronicler and even accidental journalist of the most transformative events of the moment.
A story from two prisms full of enigmas, adventures and also love and even epic. from Madrid and its sinister calle del Turco to the most convulsed Paris for whoever was the last French monarch.
The big captain
When the Spanish Empire found its greatest glory, characters such as Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba became fundamental elements to deepen that hegemony sustained on many occasions from the war.
Initially, Gonzalo de Córdoba must have felt disinherited from his original Aragon, but his birth and his training led him to war when it was necessary so that one of the two parts of the Spain of the Catholic Monarchs would not end up battered.
The French threat could only be contained by whom everyone knew as the Great Captain under whose command and in his simple presence he could rebuild the spirits towards victory. A final starting scenario for the character's retrospective.
A novel made the most illustrative biography of one of those fundamentals of History. From Córdoba, where he was practically exiled to that glorious assumption of the character who could have dedicated himself to leisure and who ended up being an example for an entire army.
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