Meet me on the Barricades

Meet Me on the Barricades is Harrison’s most experimental work, including a series of fantasy sequences that culminate in a scene heavily indebted to the Nighttown episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses (the novel was also published a year before James Thurber’s better-known short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”). The novel is also Harrison’s only foray into satire—an especially unexpected turn given that the Spanish Civil war literary canon, and especially works of literature written in the midst of the war, tend towards earnestness rather than irony. Harrison’s novel is thus a unique book, significant for its self-consciousness as a modernist novel and a political document.