Tomás Nevinson - Javier Marías

Tomás Nevinson opens, as you might expect in a novel by Javier Marías, with a long preamble to set the scene. It's not an uncommon subject that he contemplates, but one that has been thought about and speculated upon by many others. What if someone has taken one of the many opportunities or been successful in an attempted assassination of Hitler before he became responsible for the deaths of millions of people? But how could anyone have known what he would become? 

There is a good reason why this subject might be of interest to the narrator of Tomás Nevinson - who is Tom himself - and the reason you could say was already proposed by a longer preamble to this book, although I doubt there is any way that anyone could consider the author’s previous novel (which would turn out to be his penultimate work), Berta Isla as merely a preamble. As far as Tomás Nevinson is concerned however - the book and the husband of Berta Isla that is - his activities as an undercover operative, spy, agent for British Intelligence were largely left blank, the book instead focussed on the impact of his actions on himself and on others. All we could surmise from Berta Isla was that Nevinson's particular talents had been put to use, at least partly, working as a spy or informer undercover within the ranks of the IRA.

The preamble to this novel then you suspect is to raise the moral question of whether the action that might result in the death of one or more people can be justified if it is suspected that it may save the lives of many more innocent people. But who can say with any certainty until after the fact, by which time our course it is too late. It's a typical Marías philosophical and moral conundrum that he has explored extensively before, not least in the Tu rostro mañana trilogy. It's a subject of seemingly infinite scope, as any moral conundrum might be, and Marías digs deep.

At the end of Berta Isla, Tomás has reappeared after an absence of 12 years: 12 years where you genuinely felt the absence over the course of the novel and the impact it had on the imagination and fears of his wife, who literally knew nothing other than brief supposition. The reader likewise. This takes us to 1994, the choice of setting significant in terms of the political climate in Spain and the UK. Now 43 years old and back in Madrid, Tom knows it is impossible to pick up where his life with Berta left off, but even though he considers himself “definitively and irreversibly retired” it proves just as impossible to shake off his 20 years working for British Intelligence. And if they feel they have need of you again when that time comes in 1997, well, what is a man in Tom's position to do...?

Speaking of preambles (it's catching), it takes about 100 pages of the novel to get to the point that Bertram Tupra (a now very familiar figure) arranges a meeting with Tom in Madrid near his home and lets him know the reason why the Secret Service have need of him again. There are no other significant plot developments up to this point, just the usual methodical forensic Marías exploration of the underlying questions that it raises, along with a few high-brow cultural references (Macbeth comes up again, for example on the question of making sure your enemy and descendants are completely eradicated  “so that no one could touch you further”.

The task that Tupra needs Tom for - it appears to be a favour to someone rather than state authorised - is to find and identify a woman called Magdalena Orúe O’Dea who organised and helped enact two atrocities committed by ETA in 1987 in Barcelona and Zaragoza. All they have to go on is that she is one of three suspects - Tupra furnishes photos of each of them - and that she is half Northern Irish, half Spanish. One of the suspected women owns a bar in Ruán; the other is a profesora at the university where Tom will be posted; the third the wife of a prominent wealthy businessman. Tom, under the assumed identity of Miguel Centurión Aguilera, will take up a position as an English teacher at the university, reporting to Patricia Pérez Nuix (another familiar figure). The mission is full of ambiguities and challenges to find the right woman. With no official state sponsorship, Tom is advised that if he identifies the suspect but is unable to provide sufficient evidence for a conviction, he will be expected to carry out the execution himself when the time comes.

This gives Marías the opportunity to delve further into subjects that come up frequently in his novels, not just the spy genre - in which he is anything but conventional - but using it as a means to explore the secrets between men and women. There is a lot of peering across into neighbours windows, following people, trying to figure them out and how best to approach them. There is something academic about Nevinson's interest in the people he investigates, studying, evaluating and even sympathising with them as they try to adjust (at least one of them anyway) to a new live and new problems. He has been there himself and, being Marías, his study of others becomes more of a self-examination, and possibly, if you want to see it that way, an examination of what a writer does, adopting new guises, testing their fit, looking for false moves. At one point Tom even tries to pretend he is writing a novel and looking for characters in Ruán while trying to worm information from the local gossip columnist.

I'm not sure I would consider Tomás Nevinson (or Berta Isla) as mere writing exercises, but Marías is definitely a writer and a self-questioning one at that. At the heart of the book, as is clearly laid out in the preamble, is the moral question of whether a state or individual has the right to enact a summary execution if they know that it will save many other lives. Only how you can you know that? Even further away from that however it's asking whether state executions can be considered legitimate if they know someone has committed atrocities but would be unable to prove it in a court of justice. Hence the challenge of even uncovering which of the three women is guilty proves difficult for Nevinson.

Any questions raised, along with the usual literary and historical references that take in Macbeth, Dumas and Anne Boleyn, are based as you might imagine on the belief in the ‘necessity’ of the act of killing and assassination. Some of it - such as the possibility that Hitler could have been stopped - are 'theoretical' (as is the idea of time providing distance as well as hindsight), but there is consideration of the practicalities of dealing with crimes committed by ETA and IRA terrorism within the realm of 'justice'. As well as exploring these issues philosophically and with a literary examination, Marías really tries to picture through Nevinson the reality of what it means to grapple with these ideas and act on them. 'Una bajeza' (a vile act) is a Spanish word that I had to look up, and it's that which Nevinson has to come to terms with not just in this investigation, but having already committed previous ‘necessary’ killings. While much still remains unspoken about Tom's previous life as an undercover agent, you feel the weight he carries in the way that the questions, morals, nuances are explored across this dense work, one that sadly would turn out to be the author's final word on the subject.

Reading notes: 'Tomás Nevinson' by Javier Marías was first published in Spain in 2021. I read a 2023 Spanish edition published by Debolsillo in large format paperback. As is now tradition, I read the bulk of this book - like my previous reading of Marías - while away at this year's Wexford Festival Opera (covered in my OperaJournal blog). I had thought Tomás Nevinson might be a backwards look at Tom's 'missing years' in 'Berta Isla', but that's not the way this author works, his afterword viewing the novel not as a continuation either, but seeing the two works as a complementary pair'; one the companion piece of the other. You need to think of these things with Marías, because he doesn't really keep a check of correspondences and there are many not just with 'Berta Isla' but evidently many other commonalities and discrepancies with other works, primarily 'Tu rostro mañana' of course. Not that it matters, but is an indication of how the author writes wherever his train of thought and obsessions take him. I'm sure I read in an interview that when writing he starts at the beginning and writes until the end without going back and revising, at least not until the first draft is written. It's why his works have many familiar themes and why they flow so naturally. Sadly, of course, Javier Marías died, much too soon, in 2022. I still - hopefully - have a few more of his books to read in the coming years.