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| Javier Marías Poster by T.A. |
Javier Marías
Betrayal of a blood brother
Javier Marías's new novel, set in the Spanish Civil War, is already being compared with Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. He talks to Sarah Emily Miano
Sarah Emily Miano
The Observer, Sunday 8 May 2005 00.00 BST
J
avier Marías has at least one ghost at his back when he writes, for in the plaza outside his apartment in Madrid, Fran¿çois I of France was once held captive in the Torre de Los Lujanes. As we sit in his front room, its pealing bells remind me of Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight, which is based on Shakespeare's Falstaff plays and known to be one of Marías's favourite films. In fact, the title of his latest novel comes from Henry IV - Your Face Tomorrow - and the first part, Fever and Spear, is published this weekend. 'It's not a trilogy,' he tells me. 'This is a novel in three volumes.'
Perched on a sofa, surrounded by books, paintings, drawings and tin soldiers, Marías has the aura of a classic movie star (Cary Grant or Robert Mitchum), especially with a cigarette dangling perpetually in his left hand.
He speaks generously but weighs his words as carefully as he writes, selecting and filtering while he interweaves anecdotes and insights. His English is excellent, probably because he spent part of his early childhood in the United States, where his father, philosopher Julián Marías, taught first at Wellesley, then Yale.
By eight or nine, he was gobbling down adventure novels, Jules Verne, Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton 'and comics like Captain Thunder, a Spanish medieval knight. The anachronisms started very early'.
At 12, Marías began writing stories in imitation of the ones he liked. 'Even when I published my first novel at 19, it did belong to that period, part a tribute, part a parody of previous models, and that was quite surprising when the Spanish novel was too serious and too realistic. 'My generation of writers, born in the Forties and early Fifties, was the first who had known nothing but Francoism, who were born after the war, and that tainted all things Spanish for us.
'It's not that we weren't concerned about our country. We were the first generation to make a difference between how you act as a citizen and how you act as a writer.
'Some of us were in demonstrations, some went to jail. But when we wrote, we wrote about the things we were interested in.'
After his second book, Marías didn't write a novel for six years, but translated instead. His early influences were replaced by writers whom he was translating from English: Conrad, Faulkner, James, Kipling, Sterne, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell and Sir Thomas Browne. 'I was still looking for my own way, and I probably didn't find it until much later, if I have.'
With these influences in common, no wonder WG Sebald recommended his work and spoke of him as a 'twin writer': their narrators are commonly in states of malaise or fever; their narratives are interested in those same patterns of association that exhaust all possibilities; their prose exerts an almost opium effect over the reader as time slows down, expands or is still.
All of Marías's works feed on and inform each other but this latest novel has particularly strong links to his past. It is a sequel to the acclaimed All Souls, which people read too autobiographically because, like the narrator, Marías taught at Oxford for two years. 'Identity to me is really unimportant. What do we know about Shakespeare? The fact that I am alive is purely accidental.'
Though he wrote about this experience in his 'false novel', Dark Back of Time, the reaction to All Souls still surprises him. 'You can't always blame authors for the interpretations of readers. In the same way, you can't blame Real Madrid for some things their supporters do.' (Marías loves football.)
Fever and Spear is a morally dubious tale about life and love, memory and time, loss and betrayal, malice and war, as imaginatively told by Jacques Deza, who is separated from his wife in Madrid and working for the BBC in London when he is recruited by his old friend, Sir Peter Wheeler, a retired Oxford don and one-time spy, to the secret service.
Jacques faces a moral dilemma: as 'an interpreter of lives', his job is to assess people's characters and predict their behaviour. Meanwhile, he reflects on sundry kinds of truths and lies ranging through the Second World War, its campaign against 'careless talk', secret agents, the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell and AndrŽs Nin, leader of the Marxist party POUM, rumoured to have been shot by the secret police.
'In my books, there is always one subject more salient than others,' says Marías. 'In Your Face Tomorrow, the main subject is the near impossibility of knowing what a face, in a metaphorical sense, can bring us tomorrow. We tend to believe we know what to expect from the people around us, the people we love. Even if we have hints of things we don't like, we ignore these warnings. One of the things Sir Peter Wheeler says is that people do not want to see any more, they do not want to be alert.'
As its title suggests, the novel is powerfully reminiscent of Prince Hal's rejection of Falstaff. There is an episode which Marías 'borrowed without any disguise' from his life; the narrator's father is his own father.
'For me, it was a good example of two men who had been friends for years, ever since boys, during all their university years and all of a sudden, at the end of a civil war, one of them betrays another to the police, which meant normally you were going to be shot.' Marías's father survived, but 'what surprises and startles the son is: how is it possible he couldn't see his face tomorrow? I'm not sure if I believe he didn't foresee that. He must have seen something.' Marías hints at his own 'fever and spear and pain', but does not believe it has made him distrustful: 'You must have faith to be able to live.'
One of his mottos is: 'Sometimes a gentle man must let himself be deceived', because such humility is astounding in the light of his success. His novels have won nine international awards and have been translated into 34 languages, with five million copies sold.
Your Face Tomorrow is already being compared with Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and rightly so. It is a novel of extraordinary subtlety and pathos. The next thing Marías deserves is the Nobel Prize.
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