LOVE, DEATH, IRONY

A PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL OF MYSTERY BY A CONTEMPORARY SPANISH MASTER

Author: By Juan M. Godoy

Date: SUNDAY, November 9, 1997

Page: L1

Section: Books

Marias's new novel, ``Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me,'' confirms his position as one of the most subtle and gifted writers in contemporary Spanish fiction. Except for a section that takes place in London, the action of the novel is set in Madrid. The story opens with the unexpected death of Marta Tellez in the company of Victor Frances, a TV scriptwriter as well as a ghostwriter for bankers, government ministers, and priests. Recently divorced, Victor has been invited to dinner by Marta, whose husband, Dean, is on a business trip to London. After dinner, and after Marta's young son is put to bed, she and Victor return to an interrupted game of seduction.

Once they reach the bedroom, though, Marta becomes ill and dies. Victor is left in a delicate situation, knowing neither what to do with Marta's body and her sleeping son nor whom to inform. His perplexity and confusion continue into the following months as he deliberates at tortuous length about what he should do. Without revealing his connection with Marta, he makes the acquaintance of her family, including Dean. At the end, he returns to the house he fled and learns from Dean the last ironic and secret consequence of the opening events.

As his readers have come to expect from Marias's earlier works, ``Tomorrow in the Battle'' (his third novel published in English) is not built on the usual plan, whereby the reader is first given ideas about what has happened before the action begins and then lives through the developing tensions of a moving present, all the while waiting for a climax and denouement. Instead, the novel is a complex and exquisite narrative fabric based on a kind of double discourse whose components are the detective novel and the philosophical essay.

The detective thread that constitutes the fabric's warp keeps the reader in constant tension and suspense. In the months that follow Marta's death and Victor's flight, he tries to reconstruct the events that led to the fateful dinner, initiating a ghostly journey through a Madrid dominated by rain and fog. Without any plan, he begins to encounter the missing pieces of his puzzle.

Victor reflects on life and death; on the complexity of human relationships and their unavoidable dependence on chance; on the necessity, however unreliable memory is, of attempting to recover the past; on deception and the necessity of speaking the truth; on the effort to project a unique identity and the difficulty of doing so because we cannot be the same for everyone -- because it may be, Victor speculates, that the lie ``is our natural condition, and we really shouldn't find that so very painful.''

Spanish critics have accused Marias of writing in a cold and non-Spanish style -- Anglo-Saxon, they call it. But the author has always rejected the characterization, inviting them rather to see his writing in terms of restraint and the pleasures of a taste for language in itself, in contrast to the national tradition of uncontrolled emotion and melodrama. Behind Marias's apparent narrative ease lies hidden a complex and difficult craft, whose nearest masters indeed are to be found among British novelists like Richardson and Smollett. The result is a prose in which narration and speculative thought flow smoothly together into sober, precise, and evocative writing. It is the language of this first-person story, with its prefigurations, recurring motifs, and allusions, that ultimately organizes and sustains the novel, and that seduces the reader. I think Marias, a translator himself, would admire this translation; Margaret Jull Costa has produced an engrossing and lively work in English.

Marias's rejection of the social novel, his deliberate pace and delight in language, the irony of his commentaries, his humor, his passion for mystery, the continuous flow of his thought, and the absence of moralizing all combine to situate ``Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me'' in the vanguard of Spanish letters. It once again marks Javier Marias as perhaps the most universal of contemporary Spanish writers.