A week in books: The ideals that die when pulp fictions drive out history

What unites the monarchists and republicans who so enjoyed their squabbles over the significance of the Queen Mother's life, and death? Simply this: a conviction that the 20th-century history she breezed through in full can be seen as some sort of vast moral pageant, with the embodiments of Good and Evil clearly on show, and all the actors fit to be judged according to their actions in front of them.

Within this pageant (both sides agree), conduct in the face of the militarised Fascism of the mid-century marked the decisive scene. Ought we to boo the conflict-avoider scarred by the Great War who (in common with most Britons) welcomed Chamberlain back from compromise with Hitler in 1938? Or cheer the plucky resister who walked through East End rubble in the more combative climate of 1941?

Political thinkers often tell us that ethically-charged "Grand Narratives" about the past have lost their allure. But this one seems to flourish as mightily as ever – right down to the fly-past of Spitfires, the queue patiently eager for a glimpse of "history", and the BBC's choice to hire a narrative historian (Simon Schama) as its elegist-in-chief.

Theorists who surmise that the Grand Narratives will fade away believe they have time on their side. To every new generation, the once self-evident grandeur of those titanic mid-century struggles will look hazier and hazier. The Imperial War Museum has a fine exhibition at the moment about the Spanish Civil War. What's notable to anyone who has dabbled in its history, art or literature is how little the show takes for granted. As it shepherds visitors between Franco's baton and Pablo Casals's pipe, Orwell's letters from the front and Picasso's studies for Guernica, the captioning assumes little in the way of prior commitment. Hence the impact of the finale – a wall-mounted roll-call of the 526 British volunteers killed by Fascist forces in the defence of democracy.

Or so they would have thought, of course. If the Grand Narratives look dead to you, you might as well treat that war as a sequence of grisly shoot-outs between rival gangster mobs. That, more or less, is the approach adopted in a first novel by Tariq Goddard, Homage to a Firing Squad (Sceptre, £12.99). In spite of the Orwellian echo of his title and a setting in Catalonia in late 1938, Goddard (a philosopher born in 1975) strips the expected moral bearings from his plot. Over a single night, four assassins drive through a muddy, war-torn landscape outside Barcelona on their way to liquidate an unreliable politician, Don Rojo. Deliberately, Goddard lets us grasp their status, politics and loyalties only slowly and fitfully. Casual sex and random slaughter light up the night during a taut, bleakly humorous (and well-written) adventure that owes much more to Pulp Fiction than to For Whom the Bell Tolls.

What propels these trigger-happy youngsters are not ideals or ideology but the sudden, wayward pulsations of desire or shame or cruelty. We're told, about the politician's brother, that "questions of origin and causation held no power over his imagination". You might conclude the same of the author himself. So historical solecisms – a young woman wearing tights, the Don's fear of a "full-scale existential crisis", a killer thinking "game over" in the gory showdown – become part of the point. Here, time-bound Catalonia possesses as much or as little verifiable reality as timeless Ruritania.

Call it postmodernism, or call it nihilism – this pacy, poised and undeniably exciting début may infuriate readers who want tales about the past to reveal morality rather than mess. And there still seem to be quite a few of those around. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, the best-selling mid-20th-century narrative of recent years, is saturated with Louis de Bernières' vehemently ideological – and, to some experts, deeply flawed – views of partisan deeds and misdeeds in Nazi-occupied Greece.

On the surface, Tariq Goddard couldn't care less about that brand of engagement. History, however, has a way of wreaking revenge on writers who spurn it. Goddard has surely placed Homage to a Firing Squad in Catalonia rather than Ruritania in part because he wishes to provoke just this kind of reflection. His accompanying notes signal an intention to move away from the habitual accounts of the Spanish Civil War in "ideological and very romantic terms". But, in effect, his novel becomes a sort of literary parasite – a bloodsucker of a book that leeches meaning from its source material while remaining wholly dependent on it for sustenance. Without our enduring interest in, and respect for, the Orwells and Hemingways, Goddard's studied depoliticisation would have no bite.

His novel feeds off the history it flouts – and so, paradoxically, proves that this past stays very much alive. Even though the players leave the stage at last, the Grand Narratives of the past century have plenty of unsettled, contentious life left in them. The cortèges of the actors may depart, but the pageant rolls on.