BOOK REVIEW : Spanish Civil War and Familial Devotion : THE STUFF OF HEROES <i> by Miguel Delibes Translated from Spanish by Frances M. Lopez Morillas</i> Pantheon $19.95, 295 pages

The war between righteous and unrighteous can be fierce and bloody; nowhere near as bloody, though, as the civil war between two of the righteous.

Spain was bled dry by such a civil war half a century ago, and it is still recovering. Pity the land with a surplus of the just or, as someone put it in a context I cannot recall: Alas for the country that requires heroes.

It is the theme of Miguel Delibes’s novel, titled with an ironic ambiguity that becomes abundantly plain well before the end. Delibes has written a post-convalescent novel; his is one of many voices to declare the Spanish Civil War dead, and buried too; though perhaps not entirely composted, broken down and dispersed.

Published in 1987, or 48 years after the war ended, it strikes this reader, who lived and wrote in Spain at the end of the 1960s, as something of late and old news. Which does not deprive the book of value. Its humane political message, voiced throughout, comes in at the end with a sharp epigrammatic force that makes it feel new. As fiction, the book seems uncertain as to what it wants to be. It makes several choices, one or two quite good, and a third--which submerges the second half--like lead.

The novel begins in 1927 in the bosom of a provincial family whose patriarch had fought as a red-bereted traditionalist in the Carlist wars and who--in family legend--could have a been a count, had he been pushier. The house is dark and stolid and emblazoned with an escutcheon.

The stolidity is deceptive. Grandfather Leon, his three children and their spouses live in perpetual disputation. Although all but one are conservatives, the Spanish right was divided three or four ways, and each division was a small civil war to itself.

Leon was one kind of monarchist; Uncle Felipe Neri, a colonel, was a different kind. Uncle Vidal was an anti-monarchist, a proto-Fascist and a free-thinker. Several of the women seemed to believe that the rightful ruler of Spain was Our Lady of Pilar and her attending clergy.

Delibes softens these wars with familial devotion. And he lightens them with eccentricity. Into this faintly comic provincial pressure-cooker comes a portent.

Gervasio, the grandson, erupts whenever he hears martial music. His skin develops bumps, his hair stands up straight. The grandfather is overjoyed; surely, the boy is a future hero.

His uncle, Colonel Felipe, is also much moved, though more cautious. He keeps a journal of what he calls Gervasio’s horripilations. They occur not only from music but at patriotic rallies, and at the Good Friday procession of blood-stained Christs. He gives Gervasio a set of his uniforms.

Telmo, the boy’s father, has them burned. He is the plebeian in-law who married upward; his family are shopkeepers, he is an atheist and a liberal. His wife prays for him; his son wonders if he is damned.

Gervasio and his prothetic stigma--we see the Civil War coming, of course--make a wonderful image, particularly as the author writes as a real little boy living in the picaresque life of his family and his town. The passage of time, however, is not kind either to him or to the book.

Gervasio turns into an adolescent who hangs out with his schoolmates and gets up to various kinds of unremarkable mischief. The horripilations go into temporary recess. They reappear when the Civil War breaks out. Telmo is imprisoned with other “leftists” in the town bullring, though Felipe’s gallantly exercised connections keep him alive; unlike his two socialist brothers, who are murdered and mutilated. At the same time, other relatives are horrifically killed by the Republicans in Madrid.

Dreaming of heroism, Gervasio joins the navy with his schoolmates. The second half of the book shows him on a training ship and then on a warship. We miss his family; the last part of the book is a tedious account of a young man who dreams of glory but finds he’s a terrible sailor.

His wartime experiences break down his illusions about the glory of the Franco “crusade.” A kindly superior turns out to be a Republican spy, and is arrested and shot. At the end, he reflects. His Republican superior was a hero too. So were his murdered relatives on both sides. It is not the cause--the righteousness that confers glory. “Couldn’t it be the other way around? Couldn’t it be that the man who dies generously is the man who ennobles the cause he serves?”

It is an apt and shining discovery, a redefinition of heroism for a post-convalescent Spain. Unfortunately it comes after about 150 pages that don’t do much except stand still in vignettes about a long-ago life in the navy.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Etchings in an Hourglass” by Kate Simon (Harper & Row).