The man who disappeared | 11 October 2018

A novel by Javier Marías, as his millions of readers know, is never what it purports to be. Spain’s most eminent novelist, Nobel laureate in waiting, translated into more than 40 languages, Marías likes to play with existential ideas. The Infatuations was ostensibly a murder mystery; Thus Bad Begins chronicled a loss of innocence. But the stories are always interwoven with deliberations on truth, morality, deceit and the impossibility of knowing one another, with side trips through literature and history. Marías’s closeness to Cervantes, Proust and, above all, Sterne is no secret. Shandyesque digressions are among the incidental pleasures faithful readers have come to expect.

Berta Isla is set largely in Madrid and Oxford — as are many Marías stories, most notably his great trilogy Your Face Tomorrow. We are again in the world of espionage, ambiguity and betrayal of various sorts. Two teenagers in late 1960s Madrid, Berta and Tomàs (or Tom — he’s half English) plan to marry after his graduation from Oxford. But Tom drifts into a casual affair, and when the girl is murdered, finds himself the chief suspect. Mysteriously, he’s offered a way out of the catastrophic predicament: strings are pulled and he’s whisked from harm’s way. But there’s a price to pay, one that will change everything. Tomàs returns to Madrid trapped in a double life of secrecy and lies, an unwilling recruit into the shadowy activities of ‘defence of the realm’.

Berta, now his wife, painfully learns to accept his unexplained absences — until one day he fails to return. He may or may not be dead. Officially, she is a widow, but 12 years later Tomàs reappears, much changed, and unable to explain anything. Can she accept him?

Marías has said that he feels more at ease with his masculine characters; there is a hint of the male gaze in his work, possibly misogyny? Not this time: Berta, the desolate wife, is the heart of the story; her first-person narrative eloquently occupies the bulk of the 532 pages.