Dedicated readers of the late Javier Marías’ novels have met Tomás Nevinson before. He was the husband – more absent than present – of Berta Isla, the title character of Marías’ previous novel. Having, in a sense, given his life to the British Secret Service during the Falklands war and in Northern Ireland, Nevinson has now retired to low-level work at the British Embassy in Spain. What remains is a person whose identity and understanding of his essence are constantly in question; undermined by the multiple identities and nationalities he has adopted in the past and the deception that forced his initial decision to become a spy. But, as his old emissary, Bertram Tupra, tells him, “It’s unbearable to be outside once you’ve been inside.”
A trait of Marias’ fiction is that characters and themes spread like tendrils through his novels; a sense of unified purpose aided by the surpassing consistency of Margaret Jull Costa’s translations. Tupra, for example, was introduced in the great Your Face Tomorrow trilogy of the early 2000s and certain reference points – Shakespeare, for example – are ever-present. It isn’t necessary to have read those earlier books to appreciate this, his final novel, but familiarity with Bert Isla does elucidate aspects of the book. Throughout all of his fiction, the elusive nature of truth has been his dominant subject, whether attempting to establish the facts of an event, another person or one’s own sense of self.
Having been inveigled to return to undercover work by Tupra, Nevinson has been asked to identify which of three women has been an active member of both the IRA and ETA. But, as is also usual with Marías, matters of plot are secondary to lengthy and engaging considerations of moral questions. Detestation of real-life atrocities committed by ETA leads to questions about the morality of state involvement in killings. The decisive moment at which a categorical decision must be made by Nevinson is exceptionally tense and stark. All the dilemmas he has contemplated crowd around him at once. With such a weight of ethical turbulence at the centre of the book, it is perhaps forgivable that Marías, having held his measured tone throughout the novel, gives way to some Yeatsian sentimentality right at the end.
