Berta Isla

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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. The couple first meet during Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s as students at secondary school in Madrid.

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.Themes, characters and ideas resurface throughout his work, both the standalone novels and the astonishing trilogy ( Your Face Tomorrow). When Berta Isla was a schoolgirl, she decided she would marry Tomás Nevinson—the dashing half-Spanish, half-English boy in her class with an extraordinary gift for languages. 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”. And that strange qualification at the end, “or perhaps some other feline”, sounds bookish and absurd.

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.Marías transforms a spy thriller into an eloquent depiction of those left behind at home in this rich novel . While Berta is a fourth or fifth generation madrileña, Tomás is Anglo-Spanish and has an extraordinary gift for languages. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. Marías weaves a thrilling and desolate meditation on the psychic costs of the deep state's dark arts.

Marías’s characters tend to be preoccupied by philosophical and epistemological questions about the nature of reality, rather than their emotions or jobs. Mesmerising, mysterious, provocative, witty and profound, it is a good place to start with this genius. Here as elsewhere, the translation by Margaret Jull Costa has a lyrical flow, but she can’t rescue this sentence.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.

Having tinkered with the spook-yarn formula in his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, Marías strips back the action to stage a dialled-up drama of early motherhood, pitting Berta’s experience against her husband’s in a late-night argument over the kitchen table. Moreover, literature is the only tool available for unveiling what lies dormant in our most hidden emotions and our many masks and desires.

Tomas is determined to evade the agent’s attentions but his fate is sealed by an escalating series of events that will affect the rest of his life – and that of his beloved Berta. Full of humour and intelligence … More sinuous and satisfying than many of its precursors … Ranks as Marías’s best novel in years.