Dark Back Of Time

Javier Marías

Editions

Review

Since writing All Souls pbk £6.99, Marías has become the King of Redonda – a tiny, guano-covered islet near Monserrat which he spoke about in that novel.  His new peers include W.G. Sebald (Duke of Vértigo), William Boyd (Duke of Brazzaville), A.S. Byatt (Duchess of Morpho Eugenia), Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalópolis).  I assure the reader that my own appointment as Bookseller Royal in the UK does not influence my attitude towards King Xavier’s work – His Majesty is an enlightened monarch – when I say that this book is a masterpiece.

It must have been exhilarating, indeed spooky, for Marías to find the fictional world of All Souls claiming space in his real life.  This book, which he describes as a “false novel”, appears to be an account of what happened, but at its heart is an astonishing meditation on identity and time.  There is no linear narrative but rather three strands, each one derived from his own and other people’s memories and writings, which are woven together in such a way that images and ideas resonate with wonderful and beautiful clarity.  It is his unique style – witty and mesmerising, reminiscent of Proust or Sterne (no accident: he translated Sterne into Spanish) – that makes the passage between truth and fiction fluid and convincing.

The first strand comes from the roman à clef aspect of All Souls.  While allowing that some fictional elements were borrowed from real life, Marías insists that identifications are misplaced and goes on to describe in hilarious detail how the opposite has also occurred: there are real people who have taken on characteristics from their imagined fictional counterparts.  John Gawsworth, a minor writer and earlier King of Redonda, provides the core of the second strand, and the third strand concerns aspects of Marías’s own and his family’s history, in particular the death of his mother and of his older brother Julianín, who died at the age of 3½.  It is not just the randomness of death and life which concern Marías but also the ramifications and alternative possibilities of each moment comprising them, or the dark back of time (the phrase appears in his earlier work; it is adapted from The Tempest).

Esther Allen has done an exceptional job of translating this book, and the distinctiveness of the author’s voice shines through.  Supple, serious and ironic, often moving and funny, it is also always fresh, as if startled by the imaginative intensity which informs it - review by Johnny de Falbe