Another brilliant book by Javier Marías, his last and final novel before his death last year. Marías's prose will not be to everyone's liking: it is slow, repetitive, with a lot of rephrasing, and re-thinking the same topics and issues, looking at them from different sides and perspectives, sometimes touching on something concrete and actionable, but more often than not remaining vague and tentative, approaching reality with a default position of uncertainty and a wide array of possibilities, both as explanations of the past as well as options for the future.
The lead character is Tomás Nevinson, who we already met in his "
Berta Isla" novel, a British/Spanish undercover agent, who gets recruited again by MI6 to go back in service and leave his job at the British embassy in Madrid. His role is to become a teacher in the Basque Region, with the goal to eliminate a female ETA terrorist. The problem is that three women living in the city could be the terrorist, and could also be none of them. Nevinson has to find out and kill the right one. The British secret service gives him the ultimatum that if he is not able to kill the right one, as a measure of precaution all three will be killed.
Javier Marías's slow prose considers and reconsiders the options, the moral and ethical aspects of his situation and role, he tries to uncover the real truth behind the deceptive characters of the three women, as a kind of mirror for his own duplicity, wondering what is real and what is false, what is truthful or fake. It is also a psychological thriller, deeply carving into the weird situation of the protagonist to act full-time as a fake person, pretending to be what he is not, living the life of a non-existent person with the sole purpose of killing someone else. This duality is what his supervisor uses as the argument to lure him back into the service: to be part of some of the bigger geopolitical happenings, or to be outside of this, and be considered as a nobody who's no longer part of the system. If he wants to be part of the system, he has to relinquish his real self and live the unreal life of teacher Miguel Centurión. He is the non-existent Somebody or the existent Nobody. Either way, he is trapped.
"'After having been Someone,' he added, 'it's very difficult to go back to being no one. Even if that Someone was invisible and almost no one would recognize him" (p. 51)
This requires of course to be able to disappear in one life, and to create another, fictitious one, with all its challenges:
"Anyone in hiding, though, if she's smart, must appear to be the opposite of - or as far removed from - what she was and possibly still is. I know from personal experience how difficult this is, and I have, on occasion, allowed my real or my old me to resurface, or have sometimes aroused suspicions by not totally rejecting the old me: one's natural tendency is to discourage or avert misfortunes when what you should be doing is fomenting and even precipitating them." (p. 249)
The reason and the motivation for all these actions is of course to eliminate evil.
'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious ... It can turn into fanaticism at the speed of light .. .' Now his tone was part assertive, part recollective. 'That's why those attitudes are so dangerous, because they're hard to stop. Before you know it, they've spread like wildfire. That was one of the very first things we were taught, that you need to spot the initial symptoms and nip them in the bud. (...) 'Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious,' he said, completing the list.
I remembered that list very well, I had all too often found out how very accurate it was. People adopt a faith and grow, first, very serious, then very solemn. They start to believe everything their faith embraces and involves, and then they become stupid. If contradicted, they fly into a rage, they won't accept you calling them stupid or challenging what has suddenly become their all-in-all and their raison d'etre. From that point on, they develop a purely defensive, irrational hatred of anyone who doesn't share their fanaticism. And they treat anyone who openly opposes it with great cruelty. Once they discover cruelty, they embrace it and pass it on to others, and it takes a long time for them to grow weary of putting their cruelty into practice" (p. 104)
The narrator tries to look at his choice to eliminate the alleged terrorist from all possible angles, trying to justify, to rationalise and to question the approach at the same time.
"They had chosen to help the people they were helping or hide the people they were hiding, or serve the cause they were serving and to dedicate themselves to whatever they were dedicated to, although they had sometimes been duped or hypnotized into doing so, as had many inexperienced men. The woman I was charged with uncovering and identifying in that town in the north-west, whichever one of the three she turned out to be, had been responsible for massacres and should pay for that. Or if not 'should', it would be appropriate that she did. Or if not 'appropriate', since she no longer presented any danger and had turned around her unhappy life, it would be best to interrupt that life just in case, and because we were by our nature avengers. If we weren't, who would be, in this forgetful world?
Tupra was right: hatred was an emotion unknown to us, but we were the archive; the record, the ones who never forgot what everyone else forgets out of weariness or so as not to wallow in bitterness. I don't know if he realized it, but the words he had spoken made us - with all our human, mortal limitations - rather like the God of all those past centuries of belief, or should that be credulity: the God who retained and stored away everything in his motley, moveless time, in which nothing was new or old, remote or recent. 'For us, what happened ten years ago is yesterday or even today, and is happening right now.' This is how that God - now outmoded, but very much a force to be reckoned with for most of recorded history-must have regarded everything. That's why he forgave nothing, for that really wasn't in his remit, for in his eyes no crime has an expiry date or grows less heinous, they are all simultaneous, and all persist. There was, though, another motive behind my decision to return to active service, to accept this mission: the only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and centre, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.
Terrorist organizations cannot give in voluntarily, because if they do, an abyss opens up before them, they see themselves retrospectively and are horrified by their annulment, and therefore their ruin. The serial killer keeps adding to his series of murders because that's the only way he can avoid looking back to the days when he was still innocent and without stain, the only way he can have meaning. To do otherwise would be to reach Lady Macbeth's horrified realization, something almost no one is willing to do, for it requires great integrity, a quality that has vanished from the world: 'Nought's had, all's spent.' In other words: 'We have done infamous deeds and gained nothing.' (p. 138-139)
The undercover agent, the eliminator, has to above all these emotions, and act like a cold-blooded rational being:
"Justice can obscure, can wrap everything in a mist as time moves on, and when it expires, it can erase and cancel out, can decree that what happened didn't happen or has ceased to happen. We are neither the victims nor the family of the dead, but we are memory, those who never forget. In that sense, and only in that sense, we are like the terrorists and the mafias from whom we differ in one vital detail, as Tupra reminded me on that January day: 'They're also ahead of us when it comes to hatred. But hatred isn't our style, as you know. That's unknown territory for us.' That's true and as it should be, for we must always remain immune to the five contagions as taught to us by our former legendary instructor Redwood. 'Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious. Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious. We must avoid all five.' (p. 435).
And what is true of the need to avoid hate, is also true for love. Tomás Nevinson may be in love with his wife, even if they are divorced, and his alter ego Miguel Centurión may become infatuated by one of his potential victims, this is indeed to be avoided, because he could kill the one he loves.
He is of course in essence a Spanish author, often referring to Spain's dictatorial past yet linked to the situation in general today of the relationship between electorate and politicians:
"One must never forget that Spaniards from all over Spain - even those who don't consider themselves to be Spanish - have a deep-seated tendency to elect the worst possible leaders on offer and to cheer on whatever tyrants are imposed on them, as long as they make nice promises and seem pleasant enough, even if they have larceny written all over their faces and are clearly very nasty pieces of work. (p. 498)
I copied some passages that are highly abstract, yet of course the story actually consists primarily of dialogue and interaction of the many characters, their interesting pantomime of possible double roles and the hiding of reality.
Marías's prose is an absolute delight, although I can understand that it may be too long-winded for many readers. At a certain level, you want the action to move on, but the stalling, the reflections, the analyses and the exploring of all the options is part of the mesmerising power of his style. And it is fun to read that in a book of 634 pages, the following paragraph starts a new chapter on page 532:
"It seemed that the action, the act, the deed was getting closer. And that I would not escape. One always nurses the vain hope that something will· crop up, that the sentence will be commuted ( even a prisoner on the scaffold has high hopes), that the orders will be rescinded or cancelled, that someone will back off at the final moment. And if that doesn't happen, you appreciate and treasure each day's delay, each hour's deferral, each minute of procrastination, anything that allows you to keep telling yourself: 'It will be, it will be, but not yet, not yet.' (p. 532)
So, reader, beware: the book is not about the final deed. It is about the dilemmas and internal battles leading up to the deed.
Brilliant!
