Tag Archives: Hamlet

Maggie O’Farrell: two novels

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The only novel by Northern Ireland-born author Maggie O’Farrell that I’ve written about (just a brief note) here is her 2022 publication The Marriage Portrait. This was a historical novel (set in the 16C) about the imagined life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, subject of Browning’s poem ‘My Last Duchess’. It was ok, but I wasn’t overimpressed (link HERE).

Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press, 2013, 337 pp., library copy) is set in the extraordinarily hot, dry summer in Britain in 1976. It starts as a high concept mystery, and then like a classic whodunnit sets out to answer the reader’s inevitable questions about what happened – and why.

Robert, a recently retired father of three adult children walks out of his north London home one day to buy a newspaper and doesn’t come back. His distraught wife summons the three siblings to help her find him. This turns out not to be a straightforward plan. All three have complicated back stories; the two sisters have been estranged for years, for reasons that become apparent by the end, and all have complicated family/marital/love lives.

When Robert’s presence in Ireland is finally established, after a combination of amateur detective work and a tip-off, they all head there to try to resolve matters and bring him home. What caused him to disappear so abruptly turns out to upset all the siblings’ assumptions and beliefs about their parents.

It’s all handled very adroitly, and is quite satisfying as a family drama with some unexpected twists in the plot. Maggie O’Farrell is good at exposing the fissures and tensions that afflict families, the lies, misunderstandings and prejudices that cloud the judgement of otherwise sensible and decent people and cause them to behave badly. All the loose ends are perhaps rather too neatly tied up; it would be good if messy lives could work out so neatly in real life.

Hamnet (Tinder Books, 2020, 300+ pp [I forgot to make a note], library copy). This award-winning novel is another exercise in exploring the imagined lives of marginal historical-literary figures. In this case the plot focuses on the death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet at the age of eleven, and its aftermath.

Central to the action is the playwright’s wife, called Agnes here, not Anne (O’Farrell explains in a note why she did this). In a series of flashbacks we see how they met, the birth of their first daughter, Susanna, then the twins, and the difficult time they have sharing a building with Shakespeare’s violent, amoral father and disapproving mother. With Agnes’s blessing her husband (I think I’m right in saying he’s never named in the text, to ensure that the reader’s attention remains fixed on her) leaves for London, ostensibly to develop his father’s ailing glove business there. Instead he sets out on the theatrical career we all know him for.

Not surprisingly, we hear that he stays there most of the time for several years as their children grow up, and Agnes comes to feel more and more isolated and anxious. When Hamnet dies, she’s beside herself with grief, and resolves to ensure that her absent husband steps up and faces his responsibilities.

As in Heatwave, the family drama plot is skilfully put together, and the characterisation is mostly pretty convincingly done. Agnes is portrayed as a fey, other-worldly woman who would probably have been described by her contemporaries as a ‘wise woman’, maybe even a witch. She’s inherited her late mother’s almost mystical skills of clairvoyance and healing (with herbal potions). She’s able to read people’s souls just by touching their hands. Shakespeare is certainly bewitched by his first sight of her, when she’s dressed strangely and has a fierce-looking hawk on her gloved wrist. She’s a powerful, headstrong character, I suppose a sort of proto-feminist, and therefore exposed to a lot of prejudice and animosity from her townsfolk and even her family.

All the other characters are rather more sketchily drawn. This is really Agnes’s story, and about how devastating a bereavement can be. Once again there’s a neat and satisfying dénouement, this time more successfully resolved than in Heatwave. It cleverly (and for me, unexpectedly) shows the connection between the dead son and Shakespeare’s tragic character Hamlet.

Maggie O’Farrell is an adept storyteller and creator of period atmosphere. As with much historical fiction, however, there’s a sense of contrivance, and the author’s artifice needs to be less obviously displayed. There’s a fine line between setting a scene vividly and overloading the narrative with detail – such as the tools of a glover’s or a witchy herbalist-healer’s trade.

It’s good to see, on the other hand, that O’Farrell deftly consigns one of the world’s most gifted and famous authors to the side lines and places a little-known, interesting woman centre stage.

Sarah Moss, Ripeness

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Sarah Moss, Ripeness. Picador hb 2025. 296pp. Library copy

 There’s something not right about some aspects of this otherwise well-made novel – as in the two works of her earlier fiction that I’ve read (links at the end).

It opens with a woman called Edith, 73, having sex with her German lover, a ceramicist/potter called Gunter. The opening words represent the first of many literary references or allusions – a feature that becomes maybe a bit grating and show-offy:

Yes, Edith says.

Yes, yes. As if he might stop if she stops saying it, as if they were of the generation for whom consent is necessarily verbal and valid only in the moment of utterance…

This echoes, of course, Molly Bloom’s sexually ecstatic monologue at the end of Ulysses – but given an awkward, unsettling twist here (consent isn’t necessarily valid?)

This is a novel, we find as it goes on, that is about pregnancies that are either the result of rape, or else occurred when the mother is so young she may not have known how to say no, or been heard if she had. As this opening scene is set in Ireland, it brings into play the sad fact that young women in such situations were expected to give up their babies to the nuns for adoption (a lucrative sideline for the sisters, who covered up the transactions with hypocritical condemnation of what they insisted was the wickedness of these ‘fallen women’).

Two paragraphs later there’s this:

His hands, clay-hardened, steel-sinewed, crush the bird bones of her wrists. Break them, she thinks, break me, yes, no, and then thinking in soft explosion, no, no, yes…

…and she goes on to think of the lines in Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’, ‘Every woman adores a Fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you’.

Yes, this is all powerful, even shocking way of introducing the theme of sex, consent, pregnancy and sexual relations and dynamics – but as the novel develops, and we hear about several such untoward or unwanted pregnancies in the lives of people in Edith’s circle (family and social), it seems to me rather heavy-handed.

The thoughts of Edith that follow introduce the other key themes in the novel: identity, ethnicity, nationality, and exile: the difficulty of integrating and being accepted into a new country after migration. Gunter has been in Ireland for 50 years, Edith for a shorter time, but some years, it seems. She still feels that they’re outsiders. She contemplates the words ‘naturalised’, ‘assimilation’. She has four passports, because she’s a child born in England to a French (Jewish) mother, originally from Ukraine (her family fled pogroms there and settled as refugees in France), and is now officially Irish – but it’s not a ‘natural’ process, a migrant is never more than ‘unheimlich, uncanny’.

Ok, that’s all interesting enough. From here though the handling of these themes fails entirely to work. In alternating chapters we follow the 17-year-old Edith to Italy; she stays in a villa where her older sister is about to give birth. Lydia discloses that the pregnancy was not the result of consensual sex. Their ‘maman’, a largely absentee mother, has arranged for the nuns to come and take the baby away for adoption. Another displaced person is produced and removed – exiled.

The other, less compelling narrative strand tells of Edith’s mature life in Ireland. She likes solitude. The no-strings sex with Gunter, she tells herself, suits her reluctance to commit to a man again. She’d divorced an unloved husband after 40 years of marriage. Her son is more or less estranged from her.

That’s where I think I can’t engage fully with the workings of this novel. The section dealing with teenage Edith, a bookish, naïve young woman about to go up to Oxford (to study Eng Lit, of course – hence some of the frequent literary allusions), are told in the first person, and are more authentic, and it’s easier to sympathise with her gauche, sometimes painful efforts to grow up fast in this morally tangled, unconventional and messy adult situation.

 The strand involving septuagenarian Edith is told in the third person, which distances her from us. She disapproves of her Irish friend’s intolerance of African refugees who had been put up in a local hotel (a sore point still in the UK and Ireland with many people who protest against immigrants). As a daughter of a Jewish mother whose own family were murdered in the Nazi death camps, she could be expected to be particularly sensitive to such intolerance and racial prejudice. Yet she later suppresses this response in order to help her friend in her own story involving an illegitimate baby taken away from its teenage mother and now, as an adult, wanting to meet its long-lost half-sister.

Yes, it’s all quite complicated and put together with technical adroitness. It’s just that all these disparate parts don’t come together satisfactorily. It seems too contrived. All those literary references don’t help – they’re intrusive. There’s an academic reflection, for example, at one point, on the significance of the words of Edgar in King Lear to his father: ‘ripeness is all’, compared with those of Hamlet: ‘readiness is all’. An interesting point, and arguably it adds nuance to the novel’s themes and the dilemmas and decisions facing the main characters, but it’s also distracting.

There are many more such allusions, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch often cited (the squirrel’s heartbeat, etc.) Instead of enriching or illuminating the themes of or characters in the novel, they highlight the author’s artifice, point to their knowing artistry. The artist, as we know, should remain out of sight, paring their nails. (Yes, I’m doing it myself now. Annoying, isn’t it.)

Here are the links to my previous posts on Sarah Moss novels:

 The Fell (published 2021) brief note HERE

Bodies of Light (2014) HERE

Very like a whale: pareidolia

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Granddaughter (E, aged 10) has returned home after her week’s holiday alone with us here in Cornwall. On her last full day we sat in the garden, enjoying a beautiful sunny day. A few cotton-wool clouds drifted sleepily across the bright blue sky, and we amused ourselves deciding what we could see in their shapes.

Where I saw a donkey, she saw a bunny. Me: a sad horse; her: a squeaky mouse. Well, she is ten, and loves unicorns and fluffy things.

I got to thinking of Polonius and his devious humouring of Hamlet in a similar situation, agreeing with his prince with feigned servility that the cloud they saw was indeed backed very like a whale, if not a weasel. I remembered a while back coming across a word for this phenomenon – seeing faces and other real-world objects in inanimate, random patterns like lichen-covered walls, carpets…or clouds. I flicked through some notebooks and found it:

PAREIDOLIA.

This is the OED definition (psychology):

The perception of recognizable patterns or images, in random or vague arrangements of shapes, lines, colours, etc.

It’s from the German via Greek ‘para’ – alongside, instead of (i.e. wrong); ‘eidolon’ – image, form, shape, likeness (from which we take our word ‘idol’).

According to Wikipedia’s account of the term, our brains are wired to identify human faces in particular in all kinds of unlikely situations: two fried eggs and a sausage in a cooked breakfast, or smiley faces in emojis consisting of a colon and a bracket. We even attribute emotions to these images – hence the smiley face; it seems it’s probably something to do with our cognitive processing of human emotion in others – or possibly for distinguishing friendly from potentially hostile approaching shapes at the subconscious or pre-conscious level.

Hence we see a ‘man in the moon’ formed of craters in the full moon’s sphere, or old men’s faces in rock formations. Many astronomical groups are named as a consequence of their resemblance to terrestrial objects like horses’ heads, ploughs or great bears. I’ve seen Don Quixote’s gaunt features in the abstract shapes on the tiles in my bathroom.

Stories abound of religious imagery like faces of the Virgin Mary or Jesus in foods or vegetables; Mother Teresa’s likeness was said to be found in a cinnamon bun in Nashville in 1996. I seem to recall that such items sell for large sums on eBay.

Arcimboldo, The Librarian

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, ‘The Librarian’, c. 1566, now in Skokloster Castle, Sweden.
(Wikimedia Commons, public domain.) Here the use of books, not fruit or veg, is particularly appropriate

Arcimboldo specialised in paintings which looked like human figures but which were made up, on closer examination, of configurations of vegetables, plants, flowers and other non-human objects.

The Rorshach inkblot test works on similar principles as a means of the analyst’s determining a person’s psychological state – we tend to project on to such shapes images we’re inclined to see.

Even ghost imagery may owe something to the way shadows cast by harmless objects can resemble more sinister entities which are taken by the frightened human as some supernatural emanation (though winding sheets on corpses play a role here, too).

Pareidolia is said to be a sub-set of APOPHENIA: a tendency to see connections between unrelated things –  a condition commonly found, apparently, in conditions like schizophrenia, or to account for gamblers believing they detect patterns in random sequences. The ‘phrenia’ element there comes from the Greek for mind or cognitive faculties; the -phenia element may come from ‘phainein’ – Greek for ‘make appear’ – though it appears there’s some confusion over the etymology of ‘apophenia’. It’s sort of an antonym of ‘epiphany’ – which signifies an illuminating insight into to the innate reality of something.

I decided not to share any of this with E: she is only ten. Happy with her bunnies and unicorns, untroubled by apophenia. She’s heavily into slime at the moment.

Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season

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Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season. Virago Modern Classics, 2006

In a Summer Season takes its title from the opening line of the medieval alliterative poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman. This alerts us to the likelihood of a story that will involve a quest for a good, honest life and essential truth in the face of vice and worldly obstacles – a search for a vision of what the world might be, uncorrupted. This will involve epiphanies and life-changing experiences.

Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season cover VMC editionThe surprising amount of sex in the novel is largely due to the mid-life crisis of the protagonist, Kate Heron, an attractive woman in her early 40s who lives in a comfortable former vicarage in a middle-class commuter neighbourhood of big houses and what Kate sourly calls ‘Underwriter Georgian’ developments (it’s the Thames Valley, just an hour by train from London). It’s the era when Kate’s class of women didn’t work (husbands did that) and kept servants; Kate has the eccentric cook-housekeeper Mrs Meacock and an irascible gardener.

After the death of her first husband Alan she’d quickly married again, a year before the action of this novel begins. Her second husband is a charming but irresponsible ‘drifter’ called Dermot, ten years her junior, only ten years older than her son Tom. His only interests are gambling and drinking and feeling sorry for himself. Kate’s maiden aunt, Ethel, who lives with her in a state of sadly genteel dependency, considers Dermot a fellow ‘parasite’ – a view that’s harder on herself than on Dermot. At least she teaches cello to Kate’s untalented 16-year-old boarding school daughter Louisa, on the long summer holiday during which the novel’s action takes place, emphasising that sense of change and mutability that the title hints at. Ethel encourages in Lou the passion for classical music that Kate’s late husband shared with his wife and daughter, and which bores Dermot and Tom (who prefers jazz) – they’re like twins, not stepfather and son. Two Hamlet types (more on that later).

Most other people in this affluent, worldly neighbourhood assume Dermot married Kate for her money. Even he dimly perceives the truth of this, though he likes to think he’s passionately in love with her – hence all the sex – and this enables him to convince himself that he is no parasite. Kate’s self-deceit mirrors his: for her the sex sustains and justifies this mismatched marriage; she’s allowing lust to cloud her judgement and overcome her growing sense of guilt and shame. Even teenaged Louisa perceives that her mother is competing with her older brother Tom’s string of girlfriends, of whom Kate feels jealous, and that in marrying Dermot she thought she’d be getting a sexually fulfilling partner and a loving son. He’s the Oedipal Hamlet to a Gertrude who doubles as Ophelia.

In a series of keenly observed scenes characters and relationships are revealed: Kate at the hairdresser’s, apparently unaware that dyeing her greying hair and ‘making herself look young for her husband’ makes her seem pathetic – or maybe she chooses not to see this. In the opening scene she visits Dermot’s wealthy, elegant mother Edwina, who never rises from her bed before noon, and who greets Kate superciliously:

“That’s a nice suit,” she said in a surprised voice.

Kate had felt just right, perfectly dressed for a day in London, until Edwina had come downstairs. She still thought she could not have chosen better and wondered if what was wrong with the effect – and something was now seen to be – was herself. She hadn’t a London face like her mother-in-law’s, her skin was a different colour and she looked too healthy for the dark suit – a country woman dressed up in London clothes.

In the introduction to this VMC edition Elizabeth Russell Taylor writes that In a Summer Season has a ‘nugatory’ plot, and no ‘concern with consciousness or big themes’. She cites Taylor’s comment that she could ‘never write about tragedies’. But the novel has other elements like those in Hamlet, and there are verbal echoes that subtly indicate this.

When Kate’s closest friend Dorothea died some years earlier, the widower Charles – the two couples had been best friends – left to work overseas, taking his daughter Araminta with him. Halfway through the novel they return, bringing to a crisis Kate’s crumbling confidence in feckless Dermot, as she realises Charles has the cultural sophistication and emotional maturity she’d loved in Alan, and which Dermot so palpably lacks. Araminta has grown up to become a beautiful but shallow young woman, training to be a fashion model. She’s the same age as Kate’s son Tom: 22. He unwisely falls madly in love with her, but she’s not cut out to be his Ophelia, for she enjoys simply flirting and being admired by men, preferring Dermot’s carefree superficiality – and propensity for driving his sports car too fast. All very tangled and ominous.

When the two families resume their intimacy Charles ruefully admits he ‘hardly knows’ his glamorous, vampish daughter. She makes him feel ‘as old as Polonius’, he jokes. Kate’s reply, that she can’t understand why Polonius was always made to look so old, subtly reveals her own discomfort at playing Gertrude to child-like Dermot (and his twin soul, Tom).

Dermot behaves like a petulant child. She gives him ‘motherly smile[s]’, indulging his latest hare-brained money-making scheme (growing mushrooms in an outhouse). When Charles and Kate share a private joke about a woman they know (who’d introduced Kate and Dermot, so it’s not a trivial topic) name-checking a character in Alan and Kate’s favourite novel, The Spoils of Poynton, Dermot, culturally void, is nonplussed and feels excluded – adding to his default emotional state of disgruntled thirty-something moody adolescent, unable to understand why he’s so angry with everyone.

When he finds James’s novel lying around and reads the inscription in it that Alan had written for Kate – a couplet from Donne’s ‘The Anniversary’, with the line ‘Who is so safe as we?’, he again feels excluded and ignorant, ashamed when he realises he’d missed the literary allusion, and that the grown-ups had pretended not to notice in order not to embarrass him. Kate, on the other hand, is aware that the “safety” she’d found with Alan has been lost with Dermot.

Dermot’s mother Edwina, briefly mentioned above, ‘a proper Harrods woman’ in his dismissive opinion because of her passion for shopping, is a poor role model for him. When Kate in the opening scene pays her a duty call (Dermot is too feckless to endure visiting his mother and exposing himself to her misguided attempts to find him a job he might hold down) Edwina proposes her latest business scheme for Dermot – as hare-brained as his mushroom-growing. Sensing Kate’s resistant embarrassment, she says she’s worried about her reprobate son, and had hoped that marriage would ‘make him settle down.’ Her elder son Gordon had ‘always said so’, and he’s a ‘model husband and father… An actuary. “Whatever the hell that may be,” Dermot had said.’ As ‘industrious’ and ‘utterly selfless’ as his father had been (a Claudius figure?). She’d always wondered why Dermot was ‘so different’:

“Perhaps he takes after you,” Kate said. Her voice was bold, and no longer under control.

To her surprise, Edwina’s face softened. She looked dreamy and pleased with herself. “I was certainly a handful when I was a girl,” she said. “Gracious, the escapades, the parties, the young men. ‘She is like a butterfly and no one will ever manage to catch her,’ they used to say.”

“Then Patrick [Dermot’s father] caught you and shut you up all alone in the drawing-room, while he went off to work on his papers.”

“It was the beauty of his voice I couldn’t escape. The Irish in it.”

 

The ironies in this brief exchange are typical of the novel’s subtlety throughout. For Edwina goes on to mention that although Gordon has no ‘trace of it’, Dermot has that Irish brogue ‘only when he was trying to get round [her].’

“Oh, it was a very happy marriage. I had everything I wanted. He worshipped the ground I walked on . I was just a little bored sometimes in the evenings.”

“Harrods being closed,” thought Kate.

 

Kate allows herself this moment of superiority over Edwina’s shallow complacency, but is blind to the similarity of her own Freudian-Shakespearean domestic/marital trap with Dermot.

I’ve posted in the past about these ‘Madame Bovary’ narratives that deal with commuter-belt middle-aged women in despair at the dreariness and lack of fulfilment in their lives, their dim sense of being defined only in terms of their husbands, from Evan Connell’s Mr and Mrs Bridge to Taylor’s own short stories. The ‘summer season’ in which the narrative takes place heightens the sense of temporariness and looming disaster for the meticulously, perceptively anatomised central characters, all with their own defects and thwarted dreams. I particularly like prurient Aunt Ethel, and teenage Louisa with her hopeless schoolgirl crush on the virginal curate with the wonderful name of Father Blizzard.

Apologies for writing at such length; this novel is packed with so much understated, apparently inconsequential but essential and artfully constructed detail that it’s difficult to do it justice in brief.

PS 11 July: I asked fellow bloggers to supply links to any posts they’d done on IASS: in case you don’t scroll down through the comments to find them, here they are:

Liz Dexter, Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Karen at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings has links to four of her own posts HERE

…and this link is to her roundup of other bloggers’ posts who’d joined in her readalong – including HeavenAli’s

No cure for marriage: Javier Marías, Thus Bad Begins

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Javier Marías, Thus Bad Begins (Hamish Hamilton hardback, 2016) 503pp

When I started this blog back in 2013, Javier Marías was one of the first novelists I posted about. He’s surely one of the most important and gifted writers of fiction alive today.

Two years ago I wrote about his 2013 novel The Infatuations (link HERE, with further links there to my several posts on his superb ‘Your Face Tomorrow’ trilogy).

If you’ve ever read Marías you’ll be aware that he tends to work over the same themes, tropes and motifs in most of his work: love and death, fidelity, memory and treachery – in the domestic sphere, especially in a marriage, and the public – justice, truth and lies. Sex features prominently, and Shakespeare. Perhaps most important of all: what we do when we tell stories about these things, or listen to such stories – is it possible to represent reality? Do stories represent reality, like novels?

Marías, Thus Bad Begins Once read, novels are ‘soon forgotten’, Marías wrote in The Infatuations. In his 2016 novel Thus Bad Begins it’s people’s lives that are said to be transitory and forgettable. Most of all of these themes are rehearsed in the opening three pages of the novel. It begins:

This story didn’t happen so very long ago – less time than the average life, and how brief a life is once it’s over and can be summed up in a few sentences, leaving only ashes in the memory…

Except of course Marías is going to devote 500 more pages to this story, not ‘a few sentences’. One of his better jokes; oddly, for such a dark, disturbing novel, there’s a lot of humour.

He introduces his two central characters, Eduardo Muriel, a director of B-movies, and his wife, several years his junior, Beatriz Noguera. The events our narrator, Juan de Vere or Vera (ie ‘truth’) relates took place in 1980 when he was just 23, and the Muriels some 20 years older than that. Spain was still reinventing itself after that long, estranging dictatorship of Franco, and divorce was still illegal.

Marriage was, then, ‘for life’ in those days, and ‘an escape route’ hard to find: hence the need for deceit, secrets; harder for women, who, if they’d had an extramarital ‘escapade’,  would have to live the life of an ‘impostor’, ‘disguise a new being before it even had a face to show the world’ (one of many resonances from Marías’ previous novels; the Oxford Hispanist Peter Wheeler, a central character in ‘Your Face Tomorrow’, pops up in a bit part). But these bitter thoughts are those of de Vere, who finds it hard to understand why anyone would ‘contract’ a marriage; only disease and death share that verb, as if all ‘augured ill or presaged doom or were, at the very least, painful’:

…but, unlike them, there was definitely no cure, no remedy for marriage, no resolution. Or only through the death of one of the spouses, a death sometimes silently longed for, and, less often, sought or induced or prompted, usually even more silently or in deepest secrecy.

All that would then remain of them would be ‘a brief memory. Or, on occasions, a story. A tenuous, rarely told story, since people tend not to tell stories about their personal life’…

The style is instantly recognisable as that of Marías: that convoluted syntax with its accumulating parallel or subordinate clauses (he habitually deploys ‘or perhaps’, ‘and yet’, ‘I suppose’, ‘or so it seems’ – all of these appear on the first page), which delay resolution and pile on alternative possibilities and modalities. The truth is as elusive or evasive as syntactic closure in a Marías novel.

Therein lies his appeal. He teasingly, with endless circumlocution, spins his thrilling plot from such multiple, beautiful threads – for his plots are comparable to those of great thriller-noir film auteurs like Hitchcock, who’s namechecked prominently in the narrative (there’s a trace of ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Rear Window’ in this one, with its unsettling sense of voyeurism and obsessive, secretive observation of characters, men and women, unaware of the male gaze upon them), or novelists like Hardy, Conrad and Stevenson, all of whom he translated into Spanish (sexual deception and coercion in Tess, perhaps, and a prominent plot device involving a crucial letter; spies, secret agents and skulduggery from the other two authors).

But he does it with a highly original, knowing, postmodern flourish, relishing the telling (and withholding) of his story and his manipulative, entrancing magician’s craft as much as Faulkner, Nabokov and that arch spinner of shaggy dog stories, Laurence Sterne (and yes, he translated all of them, too.)

So this is a gripping, heartbreaking novel of love and betrayal in a marriage, and the shame and remorse of traitors, and desire for vengeance and retribution in the betrayed. Forgiveness is withheld too long; love festers. A tragic marital secret revealed lies at its heart, and its disclosure to the reader, long delayed, is devastating.

The plot of Hamlet provides a kind of template (although Rumour’s Prologue to Henry IV.2 is also a running thread). De Vere is recruited by the wronged husband to act as his spy. Not on the treacherous wife, but on the husband’s lecherous old friend, who he suspects committed ‘vile acts’ against women.

De Vere portrays himself from the outset as a modern Polonius – ‘there’s nothing original about me’ he says, twice (although on the second occasion he adds, ‘nor, I suppose, about any of the others’). He gains the confidence of a man ‘in order to betray him’, a deception that causes him frequent spasms of guilt. Instead of an arras, de Vere spies on his target, engaged in a sordid tryst inside a Catholic sanctuary, from the top of a tree. When he’s challenged by a nun when he descends, the scene is like a comic take on Hamlet’s ‘get thee to a nunnery’ speech.

There are the usual lengthy monologues on all of these key themes. Their presence in this domestic tragedy is linked overtly to their counterparts in the bloodstained, labyrinthine Spanish political past: the stories, crimes, denunciations, blackmail, revenge and brutal atrocities perpetrated during the Civil War, and then worse that followed during the aftermath, then again after Franco’s death.

There was a ‘pact of forgetting’ after Franco, when Spaniards collectively showed ‘open distaste for and aversion to revenge and betrayal’, and ‘fallacious tales’ and brazen, ‘barefaced lies’, ‘secrecy and concealment’ proliferated. They erased or embellished memories, all traces of these earlier crimes and cruelties — a central factor in this novel, echoed in the domestic tragedy enacted in the Muriel household. Private talk mirrors the public discourse; ‘concealment and disguise’ became the order of the day.

De Vere comes to learn the expediency of ‘giving up trying to know what we cannot know, of removing ourselves from the hubbub of what others tell us throughout our life, so much so that even what we experience and witness seems more like a story told to us…’ And:

Households are full of rejections and slights and mortifications and insults, especially behind closed doors (and sometimes one gets shut inside with them by accident).

Once we learn the ‘facts’ of what happened,

Perhaps it’s best to shrug one’s shoulders and nod and ignore them, to accept that this is the way of the world.

Only then does ‘worse remain behind, because at least it is over. And thus bad only begins, the bad that has not yet happened.’

I’m not sure I get that. It seems to be a philosophy of stoical resignation – Hamlet’s lesson. Readiness is all (an axiom quoted in the narrative).

I didn’t find this ‘public/private’ structure is robust enough to sustain such a lengthy narrative. For the first time in my reading of Marías I found myself wanting to skip yet another meandering, portentous discourse on a philosophical topic that teetered on the edge of banality (so death is final, is it?).

In this post-truth world, however, there’s a sad contemporary relevance to a novel that, despite these longueurs, is still a stirring read.

Apologies that this post has become so long. It’s a long, richly complex novel, and I found it difficult to be brief.