“Thus bad begins and worse remains behind,” says Shakespeare’s tragic Dane Hamlet to his mother Gertrude, after confronting her with her “crime” of marrying Claudius. His preceding line is the more often quoted: “I must be cruel only to be kind” — and it lingers over Javier Marías’s latest novel, which contemplates unusual cruelties and their repercussions.
Marías comes with the rather intimidating tag of “Spain’s greatest living novelist”. Do not be disheartened: Thus Bad Begins is unmistakably a Marías book, with its loping, looping, clause-crammed sentences that casually elide thoughts, ideas, even timeframes; its constant digressions into long, chatty, metaphysical ponderings; its pointed repetitions; even familiar characters from previous novels.
But here he manages to tread the tightrope between a very literary fiction and an absorbing plot; the book dangles the promise of dark, sexual secrets revealed, even as it draws you into a contemplation of the wrenching dilemmas that have shaped modern Spain and, Marías postulates, undermined its defining sense of honour.
Our narrator, Juan de Vere, as with many of Marías’s protagonists, is looking back to events in his youth, when he was a 23-year-old in the Madrid of 1980, working as an assistant to the one-eyed B-movie director Eduardo Muriel — this gives Marías the opportunity to indulge his inner film geek, to bring in references to his real-life uncle Jess Franco (a man whose movies were so bad they have now become cult viewing) and even to give the actor Herbert Lom a role in a key scene.
Muriel has been told something troubling about his old friend Jorge Van Vechten — that this eminent, respected doctor had, in his past, “behaved in an indecent manner towards a woman, or possibly more than one” — and he persuades de Vere to lure Van Vechten into revealing whether this is true, by taking him out every night to enjoy the post-dictatorship explosion of hedonism that was Madrid’s Movida movement and observing his actions.
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“It’s a world not unlike Hamlet’s, full of spying, lying and supposition
It’s a rather underhand way to take the high ground and decide whether to ostracise a friend, you might think; and the moral waters are further muddied by the fact that Muriel is treating his wife, Beatriz Noguera, in an appalling manner, humiliating her at every turn and denying her all intimate contact, because, it seems, of a lie she told many years ago. De Vere is as intrigued by the voluptuous Beatriz’s supposed crime as Van Vechten’s, and takes to following her as she drifts, dazed, possibly suicidal, through the city — with echoes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo — to some surprising assignations.
As Muriel says: “Almost everything has to do with the War . . . one way or another.” The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath has been a troubling theme in past novels by Marías. Here, he’s taking on the ramifications of the collectively agreed “pact of forgetting” after Franco’s death, when, to try to stop Spain rending itself apart again, the crimes of the civil war and the mercilessly punitive fascist dictatorship that followed it were laid to one side. Fervent franquistas found themselves free to reshape their past, with no one challenging their accounts of their Republican sympathies.
In such a fetid environment of secrets and resentments, right and wrong, even truth itself become slippery concepts. This is the dark heart of Marías’s book, which presents a bewildering world, not unlike Hamlet’s, full of spying, lying and supposition and with no moral absolutes. What we choose to forget can still come back to bite us, Marías reminds us, in a novel that teases, tantalises, entertains and is easily as engrossing as anything he’s written before.
Thus Bad Begins by Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, Hamish Hamilton, 503pp, £18.99. To buy this book for £16.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134