After Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-longlisted Warlight and Kate Atkinson’s Transcription, Javier Marías’s new book is the latest literary novel to take an unexpected approach to the espionage-thriller formula, mixing marital intrigue with a history lesson of late 20th-century conflict.
High-school sweethearts Berta – magnetically attractive – and half-English Tomás part ways for university in the 1960s, she staying in Madrid and he going to Oxford, where it’s intimated that as a gifted linguist and mimic he might prove handy to the secret services. No sooner does he decline than he’s hauled in by police, after a woman he’s been sleeping with is found strangled hours after their last meeting. Tomás is the prime suspect, unless, that is, he happens to have changed his mind about spying for his adopted country.
What begins as a caper – he’s later sent to Blackwell’s bookshop with instructions to make himself known to his prospective handler by browsing TS Eliot’s poems – switches dramatically into a sober totting-up of spying’s personal cost, when the focus falls on Berta, narrating more than two decades hence with Tomás missing, presumed dead. She starts by recalling their early days as a married couple back in Madrid, after Tomás comes back from Oxford for a British embassy post involving an unexpected amount of travel. At one point, he returns from a two-month trip with a facial scar that mysteriously vanishes by the time he’s back from his next trip.
Alone in the park with their baby son, she’s buttonholed by a pair of Irish diplomats – so they say – who claim Tomás is an MI6 agent “invading” their country, as one of them spills lighter fluid on the baby’s pram, ready to spark up.
The unspoken threat leads Berta to follow foreign news with new eyes. “I still clung to the idea that England was different,” she says, reading up on Northern Ireland, as her anticolonialist instincts rub up against a fear that Tomás, who reluctantly admits he’s a spy without saying where or how, might become the latest high-profile British scalp.
Having tinkered with the spook-yarn formula in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Marías strips back the action to stage a dialled-up drama of early motherhood, pitting Berta’s experience against her husband’s in a late-night argument over the kitchen table. While she’s horrified that – with their shared memory of life under Franco – Tomás could be a tool of state violence, he accuses Berta of naivety over the skulduggery buttressing everyday life: “Why do you think people can live in peace, can get on with their lives, focus on their personal sufferings and hardships… without a thought for anything else?”
By the time the climax swings back to his perspective, with Tomás finally emerging from deep cover, it’s moot whether his high-minded defence has survived, as Marías’s trademark long sentences – stories in themselves, undoing facts even as they’re stated – unspool a twisty, thought-provoking tale that puts notions of truth and morality under pitiless scrutiny.
• Berta Isla by Javier Marías is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.33 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
