Berta Isla (2017)
Javier Marías (1951)
Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (2018)
480 pages
In the popular imagination – fueled by an unending stream of books and movies – spies live lives filled with adventure and danger, moving from one harrowing assignment to the next. Whether portrayed as brooding loners or dashing playboys, it’s the circumstances of their missions that generally drive the stories, with their lives outside of work only tending to come up when in service to those main plot lines.
In Berta Isla, however, Spanish author Javier Marías turns these usual spy story tropes on their head, exploring the life of a spy from the context of the inevitable domestic sacrifices that result: the challenging requirement to keep family and friends in the dark about the reasons for unannounced disappearances from their lives, and the profound psychological impact of needing to rigorously compartmentalize one’s mind between the deceptive personas created for particular assignments and ‘normal’ life back home. Instead of a game of cat-and-mouse, the mystery that Marías pursues in this novel – and that in fact animates so much of his work – lies in how little we know, how little we in fact can know, about those closest to us, and even about ourselves.And so it goes for the novel’s eponymous lead, Berta. As the story opens a new boy, Tomás Nevinson, enrolls at her school in Madrid, and for Berta it’s love at first sight. The pair soon begin dating, and when, after graduation, Tomás goes off to study at Oxford, they still manage to maintain their relationship, following a seemingly inevitable path to marriage, though they see each other for only a few weeks at a time each year. For Berta the future seems, if not clearly defined, then at least comfortably foreseeable; Tomás, too, anticipates contentedly his future with Berta, pursuing his studies with great success and imagining a comfortable and rather placid life: a staid career and a loving marriage.
Toward the end of his studies, however, a shocking event results in Tomás signing on with the British intelligence services, profoundly altering the course of his life. Upon returning to Madrid, and a nominal position at the British embassy, he and Berta soon do marry; but Tomás’ explicit orders to not tell even his new wife – much less his other family and friends – about his role as a spy, inexorably engulfs their marriage, and his broader life, in a fog of lies and deceit.
Tomás’ real job requires him to regularly return to London for what he tells Berta are conferences and training. At first she believes his explanations for these frequent trips, and for why she often cannot easily get ahold of him while he is away. But as the lengths of his trips grow so do her nagging suspicions, concerns only further fueled by the changes in his behavior that she cannot explain: the carefree boy she had known before Oxford has become moody and often distracted.
Then one day, in the wake of a terrifying threat, Berta tries desperately to contact her husband and discovers that he truly is unreachable, and for much longer than she would have imagined. Unable to ignore the many signs any longer, she confronts him when he again surfaces in Madrid, and finally learns the bare minimum he has been allowed, given the circumstances, to reveal to her.
Coming to understand that a significant part of Tomás’ life will always remain hidden from her and that each time he leaves it could be to face dangers she can only darkly imagine, she must confront the question of whether her deep love for the boy she once knew can be sustained with this man who has become so transformed and mysterious to her. Tomás too, struggles with the destructive consequences of his life of deception, not only on his marriage, but also on the people targeted in his missions, and, finally, on his own sense of himself.
In Berta Isla, as in so many of his earlier stories, Marías masterfully builds an engagingly intricate and compelling plot from what seems at first a relatively simple set-up. In Thus Bad Begins, for example, a young man is asked by his boss to observe and report back on a friend of the boss, based on a vague accusation of indecent behavior. In The Infatuation a young woman becomes infatuated with a couple she regularly sees at a café, and, when they no suddenly no longer show up, she becomes obsessed with finding out why. And, in The Man of Feeling, an opera singer sees two men and a beautiful woman sitting together on a train, and, when later encountering them again, implicates himself into their lives. In each of these stories, chance moments and encounters end up throwing the main characters’ lives off balance, forcing them to not only confront the inscrutable motives and desires of those closest to them, but also to recognize the often profound mystery of their own behaviors and motivations. 
A novelty of the story Marías constructs in Berta Isla lies in the state imposed requirement on Tomás that he thoroughly partition himself between his work and the rest of his life. As the number of missions increases, each requiring its own particular persona, he comes to realize that this partitioning will only continue to become more difficult for him and that, beyond the inherent danger of his missions, he faces a life of increasing psychological strain, for both himself, and for his love, Berta.The twists and turns in Berta Isla allow it to stand as an effective and engaging mystery story; but the fully formed characters of Berta and Tomás, and their struggle to work through the lives they’ve chosen, give the novel it’s heart. That said, relative to earlier works by Marías that I’ve read, I found his exploration of the human condition in this story less poignant, less personally impacting, as empirically indicated by the single quote I took from this story compared to the much larger number from earlier works I’ve read by him, as can be found here.
I expect this is a consequence of Marías’ focus in this novel on how state security service rules constrict Tomás’ life and actions, as well as through him those of Berta. Whereas Marías’ earlier novels explore the equally strict but often unstated and unrecognized social, cultural and historical conventions that constrain peoples’ behavior, in Berta Isla he turns to the extreme and destructive nature of the state demands on its intelligence service personnel, and the justifications and rationalizations these services sell their employees to convince them of the singular and world-changing importance of their work. Tomás struggles with the question of whether the consequences of the violence he has directly or indirectly, physically or psychologically, imposed on the targets of his missions has truly been beneficial. And these concerns also directly put into question for him the years of secrecy and dissembling that he has had to practice with Berta, as well as his friends and family, back home.
Citizens of nation-states want to be safe, and free from fear, but so many seem to conveniently overlook, or at least ignore, the stiff cost to those on the front lines who must often sacrifice so much to provide that safety, whether military personnel or the less visible security services. And even if we do consider it, as Marías does here, the reality is that the nature of espionage work in particular imposes a profound requirement of secrecy that makes any justification unquestionable, and the acceptableness of the consequences on those involved difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand and judge. In Berta Isla, built around an engaging story of two characters fighting to salvage a life together that has slid off the rails, Marías forces us to confront these costs of the structure of our modern civilization.
Other reviews / information:
Other works I have read by Marías, though I read all but one before I began this blog of reviews:
- While the Women are Sleeping: A collection of short stories.
- When I was Mortal: A collection of short stories.
- A Heart so White: A novel of a man who upon getting married reconsiders his past.
- Dark Back of Time: A novel written as a kind of imagined biography; a study of human nature that will pull you in deeply and force you to consider ideas and fears you had tried to leave buried in your subconscious.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment