Forget that this novel happens to be written in the Cold War spy genre. That’s incidental. It is in every sense literary fiction and as such contains Forget that this novel happens to be written in the Cold War spy genre. That’s incidental. It is in every sense literary fiction and as such contains some truly astounding pages. One caveat: the male-female relationships seem oversexed in a way that was the convention in the 1980s. The criminal father aspect reminds somewhat of Geoffrey Wolff’s fine memoir, The Duke of Deception. The author’s very good at creating hateable males. He does it by making them misogynists....more
An argument could be made that Javier Marias was a brilliant writer. One example, most authors can’t write about sex. Martin Amis has given this matteAn argument could be made that Javier Marias was a brilliant writer. One example, most authors can’t write about sex. Martin Amis has given this matter some thought. “Carnal bliss,” he says, “is more or less impossible to evoke. . . Erotic prose is either pallidly general or unviewably specialized.” *
Moreover, most fiction usually stops for sex and resumes afterward, interrupting the flow of the story. But Javier Marias can carry the narrative forward during sex — not that there’s much of it. But somehow he makes the intimacy integral to the tale, not extraneous, and not off-putting.
The recent death of the author at 70 has brought me back to this novel, which I previously called a “bloated whale.” I may have overdosed on his idiosyncratic style by the time I got to this last volume of his 1,200+ page post-Cold War spy trilogy.
It’s a spy novel, yes, but not in the Ian Fleming sense; Fleming wrote actioners. YFT Vol. 3, by contrast, is a highly readable intellectual thriller. It’s like Philip Roth‘s American Pastoral in a ruminative sense. It considers many matters and reconsiders them in light of new evidence or conclusions. It’s modernist. A major theme is how violence irredeemably changes us.
Jaime has left his estranged wife in Madrid, who has become involved with another man, to go to work for London’s spy services. He is an interpreter of people. He is paid well to read people, to give the agency a sense of their weaknesses. Jaime’s mentor in Oxford, Wheeler, explains the need for such specialists.
“According to Wheeler, there were very few people with our curse or gift, and we were getting fewer and fewer, and he had lived long enough to notice this unequivocally. 'There are hardly any such people left, Jacobo,’ he had told me. 'There were never many, very few in fact, which is why the group was always so small and so scattered. But nowadays there's a real dearth. The times have made people insipid, finicky, prudish. No one wants to see anything of what there is to see, they don't even dare to look, still less take the risk of making a wager; being forewarned, foreseeing, judging, or, heaven forbid, prejudging, that's a capital offence. No one dares any more to say or to acknowledge that they see what they see, what is quite simply there, perhaps unspoken or almost unsaid, but nevertheless there. No one wants to know; and the idea of knowing something beforehand, well, it simply fills people with horror, with a kind of biographical, moral horror.” (p. 439)
Naturally, Jamie’s job accords beautifully with what Marias does as a novelist.
Western twentieth century history, especially that of British spying — MI5, MI6, Cold War espionage, black propaganda, assets working abroad, the turncoats Philby, Maclean, etc. wartime high jinks, peacetime coercive ops, etc. — is used as background. Here’s an interesting quote that serves as a somewhat reductive description of the author’s narrative approach.
“I wasn't going to allow him to continue wandering and digressing, not on a night prolonged at his insistence; nor was I prepared to allow him to drift from an important matter to a secondary one and from there to a parenthesis, and from a parenthesis to some interpolated fact, and, as occasionally happened, never to return from his endless bifurcations, for when he started doing that, there almost always came a point when his detours ran out of road and there was only brush or sand or marsh ahead.” (p. 22)
Actually Marias never runs out of story; the book is remarkably sustained. Back in Madrid briefly Jamie’s friend, a matador — who provides him with a pistol to put a scare into his estranged wife’s new man — is coolness itself with the beautiful Old World manners which come across even in his translated speech.
“'The first thing to remember, Jacobo, is never put your finger on the trigger until you know you're going to shoot. Always keep it resting on the guard, OK? Even if the pistol isn't cocked. Even if it's not loaded.’
“He used what was to me an unfamiliar, seemingly old-fashioned word for 'guard,’ ‘guardamonte,' but then Miquelin was himself in the process of becoming old-fashioned too, a relic, like his generosity. I didn't need to ask any questions, though, because he showed me what to do and I could see where he placed his forefinger. Then he handed the pistol to me, so that I could do the same, or copy him. I had forgotten what a heavy thing a pistol is; in the movies, they hold them as if they were as light as daggers. It takes an effort to lift one, and still more of an effort to hold it steady enough to aim.
“And then the Maestro taught me how to use it.” (p. 344)
If I have a criticism it’s that Jaime’s interiority can irritate at times; he’s a deep thinker who never seems to pass up an equivocation. His second guessing at just the moment he kidnaps his wife’s boyfriend is one particularly annoying example.
Be advised, Marias is not light reading; this is not a book to take on a flight or to the beach. The sentences are long and often Proustian. I was far too tough on Vol. 2, which I discuss elsewhere. But If you want to know more about the trilogy’s plot, that’s the review to read.
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