Berta Isla by Javier Marías review – secret life of a spy

It is a source of continuing regret to me that I’ve never been approached to be a spy – especially since I came of age during the cold war, speak Russian, and went to boarding school and Cambridge. Come to think of it, maybe it looked as if I was trying too hard. Judging by Javier Marías’s new novel, I dodged a bullet, not least because of the havoc that a career in espionage wreaks on those closest to you.

Berta Isla is a young woman who falls in love with and marries a spy called Tomás Nevinson. The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid. While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages.

They choose each other as life partners with a strange and touching certainty. Their conviction that they are meant to be together is particularly striking in a book that so often asserts our powerlessness over our fate and questions our basis to make judgments about anything. At the same time, there’s a detachment and pragmatism about Berta and Tom. Both lose their virginity to other people: Tom, while he’s at Oxford, studying languages; Berta to a young bullfighter she meets in the street during an anti-government rally. These infidelities only strengthen their conviction that they’re destined for each other.

Tomás’s talent for languages and mimicry comes to the attention of MI6. He declines their offer, which is made through his tutor, Peter Wheeler, but then finds himself a suspect in a murder inquiry. The intelligence services – the exact branch is never made clear – use the murder accusation as a means to entrap Tom in a career as an infiltrator.

Tom now embarks on a double life, posing as an embassy employee and raising a family in Madrid with Berta while frequently travelling abroad to take part in undercover operations. He doesn’t tell Berta, and she accepts his absences unquestioningly, until a threatening encounter with a creepy pair of IRA sympathisers forces her to recognise that Tomás is involved in intelligence work.

Powerless to influence him, often unable to contact him, Berta’s love and patience are tested over decades, as the turbulence of the 1970s gives way to the Falklands war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. For much of this time, Tomás is absent, suspected dead. Berta, we realise, is becoming something she feared as a schoolgirl: someone whose story “did not merit being told by anyone, or only as a fleeting reference when recounting someone else’s more eventful and interesting life”.

This is not a novel about spycraft, the drama of going undercover, or even – despite much allusion to the subject – the moral choices attending the profession of secret agent (we never find out what Tomás’s work actually entails, so it’s impossible to know what moral boundaries he may or may not transgress). Marías is above all interested in negative states: waiting, uncertainty, insignificance, ignorance, deception and self-deception. Throughout the book, he enacts his characters’ various degrees of puzzlement in winding digressions about the mists and vapours that obscure our knowledge of each other and ourselves.

A bestselling author in his native Spain, Marías is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the Nobel prize. Berta Isla is a companion piece to his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, set in the world of the British intelligence service; many of the themes and some of the characters recur. Peter Wheeler, who recruits Tomás, and Bertie Tupra, his handler, play significant roles in the other books.

Marías is often praised for his discursive, ruminative style, and has been compared to Henry James, Montaigne, Proust, Laurence Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne – he translated these last two into Spanish. In fact, reading Berta Isla, I learned rather more about translation and the Spanish use of the subjunctive than I did about the profession of spying. His preoccupations are overtly literary and the text is studded with references to Shakespeare and TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Marías is also a remarkably long-winded writer who has made his prolixity a badge of honour. In the past, he has talked about using his writing to do a special kind of literary thinking, worrying at an idea over a succession of clauses to get at a kernel of truth or exactness. Yet on the page, this often comes across as fussy and distracting. The prose seems written more for its cadences than the images it evokes. For instance, Tomás’s tutor “looked straight at Tomás with his blue eyes slightly narrowed, and so penetrating they were like sparks, as if they could not help scrutinising everything with a degree of suspicion, to the point that the blue seemed to metamorphose into yellow, like the eyes of a sleepy, but very alert lion, or perhaps some other feline”. Here as elsewhere, the translation by Margaret Jull Costa has a lyrical flow, but she can’t rescue this sentence. Try, for one second, to envisage a facial expression that’s both sleepy and alert. It’s impossible. And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd.

When Berta takes over sections of the narration, she expresses herself in the same voice, with its tendency towards repetition and digression. “The years passed and then more years passed. And the years continued to pass and pass, and first, I grew less young, and then, slightly older, I may even have begun to age, although not that much it seems, for I’ve always looked younger than I am, I’m fortunate in that respect and have no complaints, people tend to think I’m at least ten years younger.” Berta also shares the novel’s general astonishment at the unknowability and likely insignificance of everything. Marías’s characters tend to be preoccupied by philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of reality, rather than their emotions or jobs. “How easy it is to be in the dark, or perhaps that’s our natural state,” Berta tells us, twice in the space of seven pages, after another of her husband’s inexplicable absences.

“There is but one art, to omit!” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.” A man, or woman, who knew how to omit would release a much improved novella from this 544‑page tome. Interestingly, the slimmed-down book would be much closer to commercial than literary fiction, with its meet-cute scene between Berta and the young bullfighter, the menacing terrorists who obliquely threaten her baby, and the climactic reversal that resembles something by Roald Dahl. These, and the name of a young Oxford detective who investigates Tomás - “our diligent Inspector Morse” – suggest another possible twist: perhaps the real master of deception is Marías himself, and his book is simply a potboiler in heavy disguise.