Mysteries and hauntings

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach.

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel. But the tone throughout the volume is playful rather than tragic, which is a relief to the reader after the extraordinary levels of violence and sadism of his last full-length work, Your Face Tomorrow, the novel which concluded a powerful, not to say almost overwhelming trilogy. This little volume is much less taxing.

Marias is an Anglophile, fascinated by English manners, culture and antiquarian bookshops, and we find here some of his favourite themes and characters, including mentions of the well-known book dealer Bertram Rota and the reappearance (from his 1989 novel All Souls) of John Gawsworth, a minor (very minor) English writer and eccentric also known as the King of Redonda. (Marias himself has now inherited the title to this uninhabited Caribbean island.) Marias’s trick of mixing real and fictitious characters is well-suited to ghostly terrain. Is the beggar with a reddish beard who accosts the manager of Rota’s shop in Long Acre really Gawsworth himself? We shall never know.

Marias is a literary trickster, and he tells us in his introduction that the doppelgänger story called ‘Lord Rendall’s Song’, based on the well-known ballad of revenge, was originally attributed in an earlier 1989 publication to a fictitious writer called James Denham (1911-43) whose work Marias had purportedly translated into Spanish.