Javier Marias has been hailed as the voice of modern Spain. He writes, invariably, about violent death, usually in a disconcertingly aseptic fashion. His stories are fielded by casual curiosity, quiet assumption and random detail. The effect can be like watching a silent horror film. Some critics describe him as "Anglo-Saxon" because of a cold, steely quality. But he is particularly popular in Germany. So where does he belong?
His Anglo-Saxon flavour is quite conscious. He has translated Laurence Sterne and Richardson and other English classics. He has written a novel set in Oxford, All Souls, depicting life among incestuous, self-regarding dons. His references are classically English. He will introduce a quotation from Shakespeare and, in an extravagant, un-English aside, mull over its import. The titles of four of his books are quotations from Shakespeare's plays: from A Heart So White (Macbeth, "My hands are of your colour; but I shame to wear a heart so white") to Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (from Henry III). At several junctures in the books, these lines are repeated and the layers of reference are slowly teased out. Spaniards are unselfconscious about making sudden illustrious asides.
His subjects are usually Spanish. There are men in "patriotic trousers" (Spaniards, he says, can be recognised by their carefully ironed trouser cut); a brazen Seville girl jilted by her lover; a man whose secret lover dies on him. There are scenes which are Almod?varesque in their absurdity: a woman finally, desperately gives in to the necessity of making some extra cash by auditioning for a porn film; in the waiting room she meets her screen partner, who insists on telling her how he was once employed to prevent a girl killing herself. Spain, of course, celebrates death in a way that some can find jarring: from the bullfight to the awesome processions of Holy Week. Marias turns that dramatic obsession on its head, but remains absorbed by death.
Another theme is the probing of well-preserved secrets which, once exposed, are quickly buried again. A Heart So White, Marias's most popular book, tells the story of a man, Juan Ranz, who feels uneasy about his father's past. It begins at his own wedding when his father slips him some troubling advice about the importance of keeping secrets from his wife. Ranz's curiosity is roused-but it is his new wife who makes it her business to resolve the mystery of her father-in-law's three dead wives. To do so, she has to establish a close relationship with him, which she builds during Ranz's absences abroad. When the father's confession to having set off a violent chain of events is eventually won, he is easily forgiven. The confession is an act of intimacy. He is not dressed down. Indeed, he is dressed up once again in veils of secrecy: no one says anything, and the son pretends never to have overheard.
The civil war is not discussed much in Spain today. A blanket has been cast over the recent past; young people do not ask what their parents did in the war. This, in a way, is Spain's great achievement in the post-Franco era. (The enthusiasm in Spain for the arrest of Pinochet might be explained by a kind of transference for dealing with Spain's own demons by association.)
Marias has written that Spaniards today have little sense of history. This is not strictly true. Certainly there is much less Heritage gloating than in Britain. Perhaps it is more that Spaniards have studiously turned their backs on certain periods of their history. The Franco period is sometimes likened to a thick layer of ice which froze Spain. In some ways Spain is now one of the most enthusiastically modern of European countries, although full of ancient traditions. The release from the Franco era let off a vigorous transformation.
You can see why Marias's work could represent some aspect of modern Spain. His stories are marked by a moral minimalism. Despite the continuing presence of the catholic church, modern Spaniards are able to live with its inconsistencies and the petty hypocrisies it requires in their own lives. Spaniards are a great deal less shockable than the British-which is one reason why the extra-marital antics of politicians and royalty are not churned over in the press. "Flesh is weak," one friend remarked to me about some British scandal which made it into the Spanish headlines, and shrugged his shoulders.
Marias is sometimes over-pedantic about language and pointedly obsessed by the way sentences can be interpreted in different ways. And sometimes his long, unwieldy sentences lose their way. His short stories are crisper than his novels: his ideas are perhaps better encapsulated in a fleeting image than an elongated narrative. He wrote a whole book about the reception of his previous book about life in Oxford entitled The Black Back of Time (another quotation from Shakespeare). It was not successful. It attempted, in Proustian fashion, to recall how he had been inspired to write his Oxford novel and how it had been mistakenly interpreted. It was more undulating than ever.
One of the deadliest insults in the Spanish language has the insulter vowing to sully the other's past-by shitting in the milk on which they were once suckled. To English ears it sounds ridiculous. But to Spaniards it is among the rudest remarks it is possible to make. It marries both the old and the new Spain: the focus of modern swearwords (bodily functions), with the old fixation with the honour of mothers. The Spanish language allows you to think that you can still infect the past, because it still has power to influence your present. Similarly, the confident modernity of some aspects of Spanish life today can be explained by a conscious attempt to reject the past-that is Marias's theme. But his Spanishness is tempered by his sense of the importance of elsewhere. "A Heart So White" by Javier Marias (rrp? 6.99) can be bought through Prospect Bookshop at ?4.99 plus 99p UK p&p. Call 020 8324 5649
