Berta Isla, by Javier Marías

I think it must have been sometime during 2019 that I decided retroactively to make it something of a tradition to start each year reading a book by Javier Marías. In December of 2018, I had picked up two of his books, Thus Bad Begins and A Heart So White and I started 2019 with Thus Bad Begins. I read A Heart So White a couple months later, but I saved the other book of his I owned but had not read, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, for 2020. But I called this a retroactive decision, and that's because I had started 2018 with volume three of Your Face Tomorrow and I had started 2017 with volume one of Your Face Tomorrow and at not quite but almost the start of 2016 I had read The Infatuations. So, when I decided to make this a tradition, I had already been doing it for four years. I had some concerns that I might not be able to or want to do it again this year. I do still own two Marías books I haven't read (I bought them in December 2019, knowing I would soon be starting the one book I owned and had not read at the time), but one is stories and the other is slim and I knew the book I wanted to start 2020 with was his newest book, Berta Isla. So, one cold morning in early December, armed with a gift certificate I had received for my birthday six months prior, I headed out on foot for a five-mile walk with a stop at Greenlight Bookstore in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. To my relief, they had a copy in stock.

I'm starting this post even as I have more than 200 pages left to read in Berta Isla. There was one thing I wanted to capture while it's fresh in my mind, so I'll come back to this in a few days when I've finished the book, but for now I want to talk briefly about Endeavour Morse. Marías is a master of intertextuality. His books frequently draw on Shakespeare and other works of literature, but more popular culture comes in as well: Ian Fleming's James Bond books have a role in the first of the Your Face Tomorrow books. (In fact, Henry V gets quite a lot of attention, and Bond gets a couple passing mentions in Berta Isla as well). So when a policeman named Morse* showed up to investigate a murder early on in Berta Isla it was only for a split second that I thought it could have been a made-up name, chosen at random. A moment later I reflected: this scene was taking place in Oxford circa 1972. The police officer, Morse, reveals he's a bachelor. He is described as perceptive and likely to fight back if his superiors try to hush up the case. This can't have been an accident. I'm more a fan of the TV series Endeavour than I am of the original Inspector Morse, which feels dated when you watch it today, and I've never read the books. Endeavour has not quite caught up to 1972, but still I tried to imagine Shaun Evans interviewing Tomás, the character in the book, about his relationship with the murdered woman. Is this what Morse would have asked; is that how Morse would have asked it, I wondered? I'm now 100 or more pages past Morse's appearance, and I don't think we'll be hearing from him again in the novel, but I picture him not giving up on this unsolved murder. Morse was never afraid of offending the powerful and I know he'll have his suspicions about what really happened in the cover-up.

And now I am resuming this post, some several days later having finished Berta Isla. One of things I find so delightful in reading Marías is the way all his books seem to operate in the same universe. Characters show up again and again, playing themselves, as it were. Peter Wheeler must be the most frequently appearing character. If I recall correctly, he's in A Heart So White, the Your Face Tomorrow books (where he plays a significant part, particularly in the first book), and even Thus Bad Begins, and he was back in Berta Isla. Bertram Tupra, who is central to the Your Face Tomorrow books, is central to Berta Isla as well. I also had the sense that Tomás Nevinson, a central character in Berta Isla (and soon to have his own book), was retroactively inserted into some of the events of Your Face Tomorrow. 

Many of Marías' books are about people spying upon one another, husbands upon (ex)wives and their new lovers, houseguests upon hosts, sons upon fathers, but Berta Isla is more properly a spy novel. Though, one told primarily from the point of the view of the spy's wife (the titular Berta Isla), who is perpetually in the dark about her husband's activities, location, and even whether he's alive. (Perhaps Tomás Nevinson (the name of Berta's husband) will be a true spy novel.) For me, centering real spies actually made the book less interesting. There are real spies -- some of the same ones -- in Your Face Tomorrow, but the narrator and central character is more a civilian who works with them and ends up adopting some of their tactics in his personal life -- to paint it with very broad strokes. That and Marías' other books are all about comparatively normal people who sort of test the limits of propriety. As I wrote after reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, "Several - perhaps all? - of Marías narrators are borderline creeps." Berta Isla would have to be the sole exception. It's exceptional among Marías' books in a couple other ways too: while the bulk of it is a first person narration by Berta, there are also big chunks that are told in the third person. It's also only the second book of his (the other being The Infatuations) I've read that's narrated by a woman. 

I did enjoy Berta Isla -- I devoured it in just a few sittings -- but it wasn't among my favorite of Marías' books. However, when I consider that Marías wrote several of my favorite books I've read in the last 5 years, I hardly think this counts much against it. 

* I will say that this Morse was, in fact, given a first name late in the book and that it was not Endeavour. However, it was an equally absurd name beginning with the letter E, and that it is mentioned more than once that by the 1990s he must certainly have reached the rank of Detective Inspector (we never actually meet him again), so I don't think this materially changes my premise that Morse is no accident.