The plot sounds like an airport thriller – or a Netflix mini-series pitch. In a proud and staid riverside town in north-west Spain, where ‘each individual played the role assigned to him’, live three women. One is a merciless terrorist killer: Magdalena Orúe, or Maddy O’Dea, half-Spanish, half-Northern Irish, a warrior on long-term loan from the IRA to the Basque separatists of ETA, but now either retired from the armed struggle or quietly brewing fresh mayhem.
A mothballed secret agent, one of those ‘nasty angels’ who ‘never forget what everyone else forgets’, arrives in ‘Ruán’ in 1997 on an off-the-books mission hatched in London and Madrid. Our narrator, Tomás Nevinson (an Anglo-Spanish spook with an uncanny ‘talent for mimicry’, encountered in Javier Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla), must identify and eliminate the culprit on the orders of his sinister spymaster, Bertram Tupra. Why? To punish past crimes, thwart future deaths, or simply because it feels to the superannuated spy so ‘unbearable… to be outside once you had been inside’?
Marías, who died, aged 70 last September, began his career as a screenwriter for his black-sheep uncle Jésus (Jess) Franco, a prolific director of trashy B-movies in Paris. Marías matured to become perhaps the most refined, sophisticated and erudite stylist in modern Spanish letters. But he never lost that taste, or gift, for the pot-boiler’s rough trade. His later novels of espionage, subterfuge, masquerade and betrayal (notably, the extraordinary Your Face Tomorrow trilogy) connect our subtle, ever-shifting thoughts and words to the visceral or violent drives and impulses behind them. That pulpy undertow of genre intrigue – stronger than ever in this, his final novel – channels a sort of shared narrative unconscious. Beneath our fancy ruminations, untamed beasts and monsters dwell. Sooner or later, they surge out of the unburied past, that ‘intruder impossible to keep at bay’. In Marías’s domain of secrets and lies, ‘everything bad comes back’.
Which of an outwardly blameless trio of provincial ladies might be the Maddy O’Dea who planned the ETA car bombs that slaughtered and maimed scores of victims in 1987: Inés, a rangy ‘giantess’ and hard-working restaurateur; Celia, an effervescent school colleague of Tomás (who takes a cover job teaching English); or María, the beautiful, bored wife of a pompous property magnate?
Marías harks back at intervals to the dark machinations of Tupra and his shadowy outfit on the fringes of British intelligence. Yet much of the novel unfolds as a droll, waspish comedy of small-city manners as Tomás embeds himself (literally, with one of his targets) in Ruán. Along the way, Marías explores the meaning of justice, the persistence of revenge (still ‘a beating pulse in the world’), and the ethics of preventive execution as a counter-terror tactic. When history’s ghosts rise from their graves, ‘You have to keep shovelling on the earth’. Eventually, Tupra hands doubting Tomás an ultimatum: liquidate one candidate, or the defenders of the realm will neutralise all three.
The novel benefits from another wonderfully supple and companionable translation by Margaret Jull Costa. Her 30-year involvement with Marías’s work, remembered in a touching afterword, grew into one the greatest author-translator partnerships of the age. As ever, Marías – who first came to literary prominence through his spectacular translation of Tristram Shandy – weaves his beloved English canon into the novel, from the ubiquitous Macbeth to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, with its warning that ‘any action/ Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat/ Or to an illegible stone’. Add these multiple echoes to the fluency and versatility of Jull Costa’s prose and Marías’s novel feels as inextricably bicultural as its narrator.
Admirers like to praise the baroque, serpentine, recursive style that Marías perfected over 16 full-length fictions. For sure, he loves to take a notion for a long, winding walk strewn with literary or historical allusions (we begin with Anne Boleyn’s beheading ‘on a still-cold English day in May’). His often labyrinthine syntax catches the way that minds still meander and gyrate amid passion, treachery and deceit. Proust meets Le Carré, the critics’ cliché ran, and it’s not entirely wrong. Even over its 600-plus pages, however, Tomás Nevinson rolls forward with a satisfying momentum.
Sink into the tidal flow of Tomás’s monologue, and it tugs you along fast. The suspense stems not only from his quest to uncover a butcher of innocents, but from the creeping, then cascading, nature of his trains of thought: like those end-of-the-pier games where a fractionally mobile penny suddenly triggers a jackpot avalanche. Tomás often dwells on memory, private and historical, as it moulds character and guides – or impedes – action. After another nod to Macbeth, he wonders: ‘In the vast land of afterwards, what does anything matter?’ Marías seeks, and finds, good answers for that.
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