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Episode 5: an ending in the middle, "Tomas Nevinson"
143 Plays1 year ago
Lori and Tom discuss Marías' final novel, Tomás Nevinson, just published in the US on May 23rd. A warning that spoilers do occur, especially after the 37 minute mark, so listener beware.
Next episode we will return to discussing backlist in addition to our Marías deep-dives.
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Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Lost in Redonda
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
Mixed Emotions About Thomas Nevinson
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi, Lori. How's it going today?
00:00:29
Speaker
It's going pretty well, Tom. I'm really excited to talk with you about Javier Marais' last novel, Thomas Nevinson. I think we both confessed to having some mixed emotions about this one. So I think it's going to be a really interesting discussion.
00:00:47
Speaker
Yeah. Um, we're recording this two days after it's a pub date. Um, and yesterday our episode on, uh, Britta Isla sort of the, uh, companion or twin novel, um, with this one, um, that episode went up. Yeah. A lot of emotion. I mean, not just mixed, like just a lot of emotions, I would say, uh, around this novel. Um, one of those strange things, reading something that's likely the last thing you'll read from
00:01:16
Speaker
as me, especially an author for me that I've been reading for so long and has been such a critical part of my reading life. It's very strange to get to that last page and feel a last page from it.
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I read it last year in manuscript form and then reread it for our episode today. And I can't say that the second read through kind of clarified my emotions about it. So for whatever that's worth, I don't know if a third or fourth time would either. It's a
00:02:02
Speaker
I think we'll get into it in more depth. I mean, it's signature Marais. I mean, the writing, the themes, the interiority, but there's just something about it to me that feels a little bit, a little bit like I wanted his last novel to be something else. Yeah. I mean, I think,
00:02:29
Speaker
I absolutely agree and we'll get into this, but it is a very different novel from a lot of what else he has done. I'm trying to rack my brain. I can't really think of any of his novels that work or discuss things quite like this one.
00:02:50
Speaker
was getting that and I think I brought that up in the last one that there's like a big discussion of state power. I think that is very much at the forefront of this novel. I mean, it's almost more
Major Themes and Plot Overview
00:03:05
Speaker
blatantly prescriptive in a way than his other works, which are more meanderings along different winding moral paths. This one seems to have a very
00:03:19
Speaker
particular outlook, which is unusual for his work. But yeah, I think we're doing a lot of pretties. So to get things moving, I'll just do a really quick summary of the significant portion of the novel.
00:03:39
Speaker
We're just going to say this upfront. We will get into some of the major turns in the novel that folks may not want to hear from us if they haven't read it yet. So we'll give a bit of a spoiler warning when we're going to start launching into those portions more explicitly. So feel free to listen until we get to that point. And my summary will not really get into any of that.
00:04:07
Speaker
at this moment, though, of course, if you don't want to have any of it spoiled, by all means, get to your local indie, buy it, read it, and then give it a listen. And I'm being very clear when I say get yourself to your local indie. Local can be many things these days, but indie really just means the one thing. So keep that in mind, too. Okay, so Thomas Devinson. As we said, this is the
00:04:37
Speaker
intertwined, twinned companion to the novel Berta Isla. It picks up about three years after Berta Isla raps. Tomas has been working at the embassy seeing Berta and his children
00:04:56
Speaker
every so often, it seems he has more of a life with Berta. I mean, not much of one, but more of one with Berta than with the children who are at this point, pre-teen to teens and not especially interested in what this basically stranger is interested in being involved in their lives. And Thomas'
00:05:19
Speaker
called up by his former boss, Bertie Tupera. Tupera comes to Madrid and, you know, talking about prides, the usual sort of talking back and forth, half meanings, full meanings, what have you, lays out a job for Tomas, asking him to come back inside, sort of.
00:05:43
Speaker
But the job is to go to a town in Spain and identify which of three women is a underground ETA slash IRA operative that took part in a major bombing back in 1987. This novel is taking place in 97.
00:06:05
Speaker
which I have to say is such a weird thing about these two novels is the actual time stamping. Like you get a sense in the other novels about when approximately things are taking place. You can somewhat date them by like cell phones and things like that. But to be so explicitly in
00:06:24
Speaker
in a set time, but also time and dates play such a huge role in this novel, much as they did in Berta. It's one of the things I think sets these two novels apart from a lot of Marius's other work.
00:06:36
Speaker
Well, I think that especially Tomás has a lot of reticence about going back and becoming active again. And I think one of the things that we keep seeing emphasized is that he's being asked to somehow
00:07:00
Speaker
do a retributive kind of act for a crime that happened 10 years ago. And apart from the fact that he's very uncomfortable, that he's essentially being asked to identify and thereby have assassinated a woman
00:07:24
Speaker
is this kind of, you know, 10 years have lapsed, you know, maybe if it is one of these women that I'm going to the town of Rouen in Spain to spy on, you know, maybe she's changed, you know, maybe she's sorry for what she did. And so the 10 years I think here is really important. No, absolutely. And there's quite a bit of discussion that
00:07:50
Speaker
that Thomas and Tuprah go back and forth. I mean, a lot of it's interior, but I think, I frequently think that in the conversations with Tuprah are even the interior thoughts are part of that larger conversation to the degree that Tuprah in some ways may even be participating in them since he reads and in some ways controls Thomas so cleanly and in such impressive ways.
00:08:18
Speaker
The idea of hatred, of emotion behind how you feel about an act or a person and how that can wane over time. I mean, Thomas, throughout the novel, you know, reflects on the idea that no one can hold on to hatred for very long, that it's the rare instance where you can hate someone for something long enough. But tupra stance is that
00:08:41
Speaker
the institutions that he works for that he represents don't actually hate. They simply remember. They are an archive. They keep track of who did what when and meet out consequences. I wouldn't even say justice per se, but consequences as a result, which is it gets into some moral philosophy that
00:09:07
Speaker
is a little bit more plainly put in this novel than has been in others of Maria's body work. But yeah, so after a bit of a back and forth, a bar scene in which Chupra- Is eating a lot of potatoes.
00:09:27
Speaker
eating a lot of patatas bravas, which is totally fair because patatas bravas are delicious. It's actually reading that scene, I was like, I have not had patatas bravas in a very long time. Go eat to your local tapas restaurant. Absolutely.
00:09:44
Speaker
But as usual, these sort of food settings are frequently opportunities for Marias to be very funny about human social interaction and how people behave in crowds.
00:09:59
Speaker
It's a great scene. And in some ways, the whole conversation is a bit of a seduction. I mean, Touper is employing a lot of the same language and Thomas knows it too. But Touper is employing a lot of the same language that he used, and even Peter, we were used to get Thomas interested and then eventually like locked into the life of a
00:10:21
Speaker
secret agent or spy or however you want to refer to it, you know, 20 plus years previously, and that Thomas is used to justify his actions whenever he talked to Berta about his actions throughout Berta Isla. Thomas eventually agrees, goes along with it,
00:10:44
Speaker
and takes off to Ruan to figure out which of these three women had a role in this bombing and then to deal with it. It's made pretty clear that once he identifies the person that they will be eliminated, they will be killed, which he wrestles with throughout the novel. And yeah,
00:11:06
Speaker
He goes through various means. One of the interesting things about what the novel is doing, too, though, is because it's three women and because there's such different people occupying different places within this town, you really are getting scenes of a town, scenes of all these different lives and the lives that different people can lead.
00:11:31
Speaker
But it's kind of a bit of a house of mirrors in that any of the three could be this person who participated in this gruesome act 10 years previously. But
Exploration of Moral Complexities
00:11:46
Speaker
all three are living such distinct lives within this town, within this society.
00:11:52
Speaker
I don't know. It's a very clever way for Marius to sort of dive into a lot of the things that he's concerned himself with in the past, I think. The choices people make, who they are, what they are on the inside, the whole what you will look like the next day, what you will change into.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, the idea that an adult could be such a different person 10 years after, and 10 years after such a radical moment. Or are they that different of a person? It's juicy, and it's very much the kind of thing that would make sense for Marius to dig into. But he does it very differently here than I think he's done in any of his previous work. Explain.
00:12:38
Speaker
His previous work, I feel like, was taking place so much more thoroughly inside of the protagonist's head. There's still that here that is still happening, but it's also put against
00:13:01
Speaker
real world or real life events. I mean, he's interweaving this into our actual history. The Good Friday Agreement is just a year away. And that's part of the concern and why, you know, Tupra is interested in doing a favor for someone on Spanish soil.
00:13:19
Speaker
is that the person they're after is half North Irish, half Basque, which is why they add that IRA component. But the IRA bit is also of a concern to them, to them being, well, the them's interesting. Is it them just Tupper and the realm? Is it Tupper and Devinson and the realm? Where does Devinson fit into all of that, which he questions throughout the novel. But there's also an intimation or
00:13:47
Speaker
supposition on Thomas's part that chipper has just kind of gone rogue here. I mean, that this is not a sanctioned, even by the intelligence service, even by, you know, British intelligence that he's doing kind of a favor for this guy, George.
00:14:07
Speaker
who is trying to track down the culprit, the missing person. I guess the other two people that were involved in this bombing, I think two men have been apprehended or killed or something, but she's escaped. And so there is this kind of doubt.
00:14:31
Speaker
on Tomas's mind, based on what Tupper said, that, you know, maybe this is not I want to above board would not be the right thing because I mean, on the books, it's not on the books or or eyes on the books as a, you know, espionage operation on foreign soil, foreign ally soil at that could be.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, he definitely, Thomas definitely cuts back and forth and I mean, very much seems to land on the idea that this is off the books, but he also reflects on how much this appears would even want to know and how much they wanted to know when he was working for them more explicitly when he was in the thick of it. When he was sharp, they go to some pains to
00:15:20
Speaker
say that Tomas has more than somewhat lost his edge throughout this operation.
00:15:28
Speaker
So why do you think Thomas ultimately after a lot of discussion with Tupra and his non-committal parting with Tupra at that time and then eventually agreeing to do it, why do you think he ultimately does? Is it because he's feeling kind of lost and like an outsider like we talked about with Berta Isla?
00:15:53
Speaker
Yes, I think he wants to be someone again. It's made very clear at the start that he is doing his job at the embassy. He does not have very many friends or any real friends or acquaintances there. There is a young woman at the embassy that he has a physical relationship with, but that's about the extent of it by any real measure.
00:16:19
Speaker
He's living a ghost life. He does not want to be inside anymore, but he can't bear to be outside. This is an opportunity to come back inside and be someone, not a nobody.
00:16:36
Speaker
that the idea of substantiality or significance or somebody is important because he doesn't really have that in his personal life either. He's really not a person of substance to Berta. They live in separate abodes. Sometimes they'll sleep together, but it doesn't really
00:17:00
Speaker
there's not a lot of emotional ties. He's lost really any kind of emotional connection with his kids. And then he's just kind of got this busy work job at the embassy in Madrid. So yeah, he has lost his substantiality or his significance in terms of, I think, how he thinks about himself. Which is interesting in that
00:17:28
Speaker
in our last episode, I mentioned how I wasn't sure how much I don't know if I use this exact phrase, but how much of the there there when it how much there there is there when it relates to Nevinson that part of his ability to be such a perfect mimic and be such a good agent is that there is no core self. And that allows him to
00:17:52
Speaker
fully inhabit the character he has to inhabit, which we see a bit of actually when he goes to Ruan under his new identity.
00:18:06
Speaker
There is a very immediate shift from I and I to he. And the he is the cover, the man named Sin Churyan. And it starts to blend at points throughout the rest of the novel, but they're at the kind of critical moments of decision
00:18:24
Speaker
Nevenson refers to himself, the eye, as Nevenson, as that man with this past, with all these previous experiences, the man who has killed twice in the past, that he discloses very early on. Only men at that point.
00:18:42
Speaker
But that person versus the cover identity whose job it is to be this English teacher in this town in Northwest Spain, but whose job it is to also figure out which of three women in town happen to be a former or perhaps current and just hidden terrorist.
00:19:06
Speaker
Another really,
Character Analysis and Development
00:19:07
Speaker
I think, funny part in the book when it's Tubera and George and Thomas speaking, they talk about his cover name. And George says it's going to be Centurion. And Thomas is like, that is such an awkward and bizarre name. It's sure to draw attention. But George has just the opposite impression. He was like,
00:19:31
Speaker
No, it can't be something that's common because that seems suspicious. So it was a little bit of a comedic back and forth about the pomposity of the name. Yeah, I gotta say, Maurice does not treat diplomats well in his novels. They specifically Spanish diplomats come across as just
00:19:56
Speaker
I don't know, just real suits. But I say that in the most pejorative meaning of suit possible, I think. They're not especially pleasant. They're interesting for how unpleasant and how crass, in a way, they are, which is, of course, funny when you're talking about someone who's supposed to be practicing the art of diplomacy. Yeah.
00:20:24
Speaker
I did enjoy that. Maria says touch when it comes to humor is so good. It's just such a, it's so deft.
00:20:36
Speaker
I think there will be more than a few moments in the podcast where I get a little maudlin as we're recounting some of Maria's gifts. We can go into a little bit more before we get – I mean, there's a good deal more plot that we can chat about before we get into any serious spoiler territory.
00:20:57
Speaker
We could kind of talk about the situation with the three women. Two of the women are married and the third is not. They all live in the same town of Rouen. I take it that George somehow doesn't know what this woman looks like or what her current name is, but he has been able to pin down that she is in Rouen and she is alive.
00:21:21
Speaker
Right, for however they determined it, they determined that the person moved to this town not long after the bombing in 87, and that's when all three of these women appeared in this town.
00:21:36
Speaker
We're also dealing with a time period, and this is explicitly mentioned a couple of times in the novel, where the state didn't necessarily keep such close ties on all of your comings and goings. Rather, digital footprints didn't exist the same way. So it was much easier for someone just to sort of show up one day and then over time slowly become integrated into a place and not necessarily, unless they want to be forthcoming,
00:22:01
Speaker
you'd be hard pressed to figure out exactly where they came from or what they were doing previously. As much as Nevinson can figure out, that seems to be how they focus on these three women. But yes, there's no physical description of the woman. There's no sense of what she sounds like. She is a ghost. They know her name. They know that she's half North Irish, half
00:22:27
Speaker
half Basque, but that's all they seem to know. And we also don't find out until much later in the novel what her actual role in the bombing was and why perhaps she might be seen as so dangerous still to this day. In fact, a lot of the novel is casting some aspersions on the concerns around how dangerous she may or may not be at this point in time. But on the topic of the town,
00:22:57
Speaker
There is a line in here that made me grin really, really hard, where he's basically describing a provincial city, not very large, has its own rhythms. He is describing something of a conservative place, which is totally, I mean, is what it is.
00:23:19
Speaker
He's constantly drawing comparisons to the town that he hid in during those years that he was dead to Berta, but also in some ways he's comparing it to Oxford. He keeps coming back to these small cities with a river running through them. And so he was describing, the apartment he's in has a view of a bridge over the river that seems to be one of the major thoroughfares for the city. And he goes,
00:23:45
Speaker
As the day progressed, the rhythm of the place slowed, grew more languid, and those jingery evenings resembled, quote, Sunday's exile from the infinite, end quote, as a poet or novelist once said, I can't quite remember which. Do you remember who said that? No, I don't. He did. In All Souls, when he was describing Oxford, it's a line lifted from one of his own novels that his character is now reciting back in this novel.
00:24:13
Speaker
Good recall, Tom. I had to look it up. I just remembered that it was it stuck out to me and also stuck out to me that he was giving it attribution without giving it attribution. So I just did a quick search and there it was. And I looked at my wife and just went that and cursed like I can't
00:24:33
Speaker
He has so much fun with these things, and it's great. But this is also an interesting way of getting to the fact that I think this novel has the most references to other works out of all his work. The Afterward at the Back lists any number of sources he used.
00:24:56
Speaker
There's a paragraph in here that appears in a few different forms that comes from Delampadousa Elliott, the poem by Elliott that became a key part of his being recruited into the Secret Service, comes up constantly. But he is using Macbeth and Richard III.
00:25:18
Speaker
I would say about every 30 to 40 pages, one of them reappears. Yeah, Shakespeare is everywhere evident like it is in I think most of his novels. Yeah, but in in such a more oblique way, which I think also speaks to
00:25:37
Speaker
Nevinson himself. I think a lot of his other characters sort of pulled those, even Tupra, pulled those characters into themselves and would deploy the quote on occasion, but almost in a way that they understood it. I feel like Nevinson is still grappling with these quotes, the ideas behind them in ways that, I don't know, again, cuts back to the idea of like,
00:26:05
Speaker
what is substantial about Tom Devinson, which is also interesting as he gets referred to as Tom a lot in this novel, which he never was before. And I don't know, frankly, through me, just ever so slightly. But yeah, so I mean, we were starting to talk about the, or we were until I took us on this little winding detour. Winding river. Yes. The three women.
00:26:35
Speaker
So one of them, the unmarried woman, is the owner of a restaurant and is in some ways the first one that Centurion makes contact with and almost immediately begins a physical relationship with Inez. Another is Celia, who is married and works at the same school as Centurion. And then the last
00:27:03
Speaker
is Maria, correct? Am I blank? Yes, Maria. It's also interesting. I think there are more characters in this novel than in a lot of his other works, which was interesting. I consider making myself a little Casa character sheet at one point. What do you make of the fact that Inez is
00:27:21
Speaker
constantly described as a gigantic woman. I mean, not so much like obese or anything, but just kind of like I was picturing like an Amazonian type of, you know, like tall, solid, a big woman. And there seems to be a lot of emphasis on that. Perhaps it's just like a plot point because we know down the road that Tomas tries to
00:27:48
Speaker
tries to affect the plan and has second thoughts, and then he has some difficulty maneuvering her inert body. But I don't know. I just wondered if you had thoughts on that.
00:28:03
Speaker
He spends a lot of time on the physicality of all three women, just in very different ways. Celia, he describes as being, I think, on the shorter side, but also plump.
00:28:21
Speaker
I think I get the feeling that Nevinson and maybe by extension Maria's found most female forms attractive and desirable in their in their own respective ways. And Maria, he
00:28:39
Speaker
He goes almost to the same extent that he describes the giant nature or the oversized nature of Ines. He goes to some lengths to talk about how arresting and beautiful Maria is, but that there are no
00:28:58
Speaker
There is no one feature that is in and of itself beautiful or especially exemplary or what have you, that there's just something arresting and commanding about her. It's got an aura. Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways, I mean, they all serve their purposes in terms of how the novel progresses. I think though that
00:29:27
Speaker
And as unmarried, having arrived in this town, setting up a restaurant, I think he's trying to even set her apart that much more from the rest of the town by having her be taller than most of the men in the town.
00:29:47
Speaker
Amazonian to a certain degree, absolutely. But even more than that, her teeth are almost too big and her eyes are oversized. He describes her pupils being almost entirely too large. It gives this really odd impression. Centurion even thinks about giving her mouth how uncertain he is he would want to kiss her and put his tongue in her mouth.
00:30:16
Speaker
It's interesting that, but at the same time, she has a desirable quality to her beyond simply his interest in determining whether or not she's his target. Yeah, I, you know, thinking back on Maria's work as a whole, I do think in, I mean, obviously in Berta Isla, since we spent so much time in Berta's head, but in this novel as well,
00:30:46
Speaker
I don't think he had poorly sketched or two-dimensional female characters in his previous work.
00:30:58
Speaker
It could also just be a recency bias, but these women feel so full, so completely fleshed out in a way that I don't know that some of the other female characters he's written have. I just want to make a point because I'm afraid I'll forget it.
00:31:22
Speaker
You know how I said in our Berta Isla conversation that I had remembered the book being just 100% told from Berta's point of view, but there is actually a big, I think, almost 80-page chapter that's very important to Berta Isla that's from Thomas's.
00:31:45
Speaker
point of view. I really think this book may have benefited by giving Berta in this one a similar opportunity to learn what she was thinking at this time and whether she saw any changes in Thomas after he came back and whether she thought that he was just
00:32:10
Speaker
you know, just feeling incredibly out of sorts and was kind of lost and stumbling through life and how her feelings for him may or may not have evolved and kind of her hesitation to like getting fully intimate with him again.
00:32:29
Speaker
I don't know, maybe I'm just trying to be like, you know, fairs fair, give her give her the same shot that we gave Thomas in the in the, you know, the same that the name titled book, but I do think it might have been a little bit of a fuller picture had we had we heard from her. I agree. I mean, Berta is not very much in this novel at all. I mean, she is in his thoughts a good bit, but
00:33:01
Speaker
I think it'd be hard for us to say that her presence is felt in the novel in the same way that Tommas' absence was felt throughout Berta Isla. Even though I think she's a much more... I personally find Berta to be a much more interesting character and person than Tommas, but that might just be my own... Yeah. Do you think... Do you think Maria's...
00:33:30
Speaker
liked Tommas? Do you think he had respect for Tommas or do you think he purposely wrote Tommas as kind of an empty suit? I don't know. I'm honestly not sure. But I think the fact that I can't really answer it probably says that he doesn't initially much care if not for Tommas and the kind of person that he is.
00:33:53
Speaker
asserting himself in the world in such a background way and just being fundamentally dishonest with the people who are supposed to be the most important in his life, his wife and his children, his family, his father who, you know, barely knows what he's doing or goes to the grave having not seen his son again. I don't think that
00:34:23
Speaker
Maurice would much have cared for that person in his own life. But having said that, again, this book is doing a lot of work and a lot of discussion of what does it mean to be
00:34:38
Speaker
What is the difference between state-sanctioned violence and the violence of insurgent groups? What does it mean to be an insurgent? There's even a bit at the end where Tupra, kind of taking shots at the United States, talks about how the US has always had a
00:34:59
Speaker
sympathy for those against the European powers that you'll notice that they never call them terrorists. They call them boss separatists. They call them insurgents, some of the words I just used. And
00:35:14
Speaker
that line in the sand that Tupra is drawing that in some ways, you know, maybe not entirely, but to a certain degree, after 9-11, the US started to adopt or at least adopt towards a very specific type of group with a specific religious or national origin, became much more comfortable using. Oh, no.
00:35:40
Speaker
It's a strange novel from Marius. I like it a lot, actually. I like it far more. When I first started, I was quite convinced I was going to hate this novel and hate Thomas Nevinson. I don't think I hate him at this point. I don't much care for him, but he's a much fuller character than I expected. The novel opens with
00:36:07
Speaker
discussions of folks who almost had opportunities to kill Hitler but didn't at different points on his rise to power, and how they all in some way regretted it, obviously, after the fact. And as I read those chapters, I was just muttering myself, he's going to justify everything he does by saying that he's stopping the next Hitler. And in a way he does, and in another way he doesn't, it's such
00:36:36
Speaker
It's a much bolder novel and I don't think it's less nuanced, but it's just a very different animal from what he's done before. It's not shocking that this is a novel written by the same person that wrote A Heart So White or Tomorrow on the Battle, but yeah, they're different species of novel, I would say.
00:36:59
Speaker
I'm going to do a spoiler alert here because I'm going to probably give away something that maybe some people don't want to hear if you haven't finished the book. But he goes back to this when he is ineffectual in completing his mission and goes back to Madrid and to Berta to the extent that she
00:37:27
Speaker
wants him and is really with him.
00:37:32
Speaker
there is another terrorist attack. And he goes back to this line of thinking that, did I have the power to prevent something, to prevent a monstrous thing happening by a monstrous individual and just failed? Could I have changed history? Would 20 some people be alive today if I had just
00:37:59
Speaker
if I had just fulfilled my mission. So yeah, there's kind of a circular thing happening with the book, as you indicated, with the way that it opens and then towards the end, the way that he's feeling, I guess you'd say, some regret. Yeah, it's also interesting. And at that point,
00:38:24
Speaker
At that point, he actually stated that he missed being Thomas Nevinson, that he wanted to be Thomas Nevinson again, and not the Thomas Nevinson that was an agent for 20 years and not the one that
00:38:39
Speaker
not the one that was somebody, someone within the world. He wanted to go back to the Thomas Nevinson that existed before he was recruited, before his conversation with Wheeler, and go back to the Thomas Nevinson that was in love with and partnered to Burda, which I think marked a real change in
00:39:03
Speaker
how he approached things and a change in his relationship with Berta. I mean, when he returns after this mission, she is much more open to him as part of her life. I mean, they are probably functioning as close as they can at this point to being a married couple and sharing intimacies to the extent that
00:39:23
Speaker
he actually tells her about his mission. Like he opens up in a way that he's not allowed to and that he never had previously and kind of lays bare his failure and the consequence of it. Yeah, he doesn't get into a lot of detail, but he does tell her that they wanted me to kill a woman and I couldn't do it.
00:39:49
Speaker
And then he also says, and she's gone on to do something else terrible. And it's so recent that Berta names the location of what took place and knows that, okay, so he was sent to kill this person and that person just committed a terror attack that killed 30 plus people. But Berta is relieved.
00:40:12
Speaker
I feel like Berta is glad that he he didn't that he that he that he couldn't kill this person. I don't think that of course she's not she's not glad that the terrorist attack happened. But I think that she's glad that the man that she loved and maybe still in some respects loves was unable to kill a woman.
00:40:37
Speaker
Right.
Interplay with Real-World Events
00:40:38
Speaker
And that builds off of a conversation they had earlier. So this is also why I think this is such a strange, strange Maria novel is the intertwining with real world events. So obviously, Nevinson is sent to ferret out this person who had been involved in an attack 10 years previously, but then
00:41:04
Speaker
While he is on this mission, Etta assassinates a local party official and it sends the entire country into an uproar. And the one time on this mission that he returns to Madrid and sees Berta, they talk about it. And Berta is bloodthirsty at first. She's talking about how these people are savage,
00:41:33
Speaker
killing people indiscriminately, what is the point of what they're doing in the fear they're spreading? And Tomas pushes her a bit on, you know, how would you handle it? Would you would you want that person debt these people dead in advance? You know, how would you do this? What would you do to stop such a thing from happening? And
00:41:58
Speaker
Berta somewhat backs off, you know, like in the heat of the moment after the fact, the desire for some form of justice, but justice in advance, something to, you know, prevent it seems too much, I think, for her and for her sensibility, which in some ways relieves Thomas that
00:42:23
Speaker
that is what she's like. But I think it also further complicates the decision that he's trying to make in that moment since he's so far removed from the agent he was, you know, not, what, 10 years previous.
00:42:37
Speaker
Throughout Marius' work, he is putting forward these sort of moral quandaries. I mean, we've talked about this a lot over the course of this podcast. What is owed? What does it mean to hold a secret? And what does it mean to share that secret with someone else? Does that make them complicit in some regard? Someone dies in your arms. What is it that you owe to their family? What is it that you owe to anyone else in that moment? And in these last two novels,
00:43:08
Speaker
He's taken it from the individual and the very melodramatic in a sense, such a tight focus, and just blown it out to international intrigue. I mean, he's effectively writing spy novels, outright writing spy novels in these last two books, a very different kind of spy novel, I think. But yeah, I don't know.
00:43:39
Speaker
I'm still very fresh on this reading, so I'm still trying to make up my mind on a few things, I think. I guess there's a way in which I don't know how quite to read this one or precisely to react to it.
00:43:58
Speaker
It's such a departure in some significant ways from his other work. And yeah, I'm curious what you might think about that, Laurie. Do you think he's doing something? Am I on something wrong? Would you say I'm on something of the correct path and saying that he's doing something very different here than he's done previously?
00:44:21
Speaker
Yeah, I've been wrestling with this concept as well that in so many ways this is signature Marais in terms of the themes in certain in terms of the style and the syntax but there's I Personally felt bogged down in the ruan part portion of this book. I thought that it is
00:44:43
Speaker
It felt to me like it was treading a lot of water. There were parts with Inez, but then Inez has this friend, I guess you could say, a drug runner. And so there was a lot of back and forth with him.
Character Evolution and Speculation
00:45:03
Speaker
my two questions in my mind and maybe bouncing it to you, just playing tennis here, not really answering very effectively what you asked me, but why this book? Why did he write this book? And do we really see
00:45:22
Speaker
Thomas Evolving from from the Berta Isla book. I mean, sure, he's, you know, he comes back from this mission and, you know, says, you know, now I'm now I'm done for good. But if Marais had lived another five years, would we have seen a third sequel to this to this storyline?
00:45:52
Speaker
I just kind of feel like there wasn't enough movement in Tomás to make this a compelling read. And I guess that's why I said at the start that I wish that this last novel was a different novel. I would have liked to have seen a whole different set of characters and a whole different situation, still within the mores
00:46:22
Speaker
body of concerns and through lines, but something that we're just not going back over this guy's hand wringing about, I want to be somebody in the world and what's the right thing to do? Because I feel like we really got
00:46:44
Speaker
a lot of that in Berta Isla. To me, Berta Isla is a better book because I think that this one is just rehashing perhaps a lot of the... I don't want to say it's redundant, but it's rehashing these concerns of Tommases that I don't think have moved that much to make it more interesting or a significant addition to Berta.
00:47:12
Speaker
And on your point of would we have seen another one, there are at least a couple lines towards the end where he says he's out. He goes, of course, until next time, which could mean
00:47:27
Speaker
could mean that he could always be pulled back in, like he's already been pulled back in once. Or it could actually mean that, because this is also being written from, I mean, it's being written in Thomas's voice, but from a good bit past this point. He talks about doing online searches in order to bring up certain names and specific dates that he also, early in the book, Thomas talks about how his memory isn't that great, which isn't exactly shocking, given what we know about Thomas. There is a point in reading this,
00:47:56
Speaker
where I almost felt like this novel was in the service of getting to spend more time with Tupra than it was really about Thomas and Evanson. I mean, you asked would Marius have liked Thomas Evanson.
00:48:19
Speaker
I don't know that he would have liked Burton Furtum-Tupra. I am quite convinced he would have had a great time sparring with Tupra. He would have delighted in those conversations and the thrust and repost and back and forth and all that.
00:48:38
Speaker
But that makes sense because he sees Tuprah much more as a novelist and as a writer of lives than Nevinson ever is, right? We first meet Tuprah in Marius' work, In Your Face Tomorrow, unless I'm totally missing when he showed up earlier, but In Your Face Tomorrow. And the whole bit about, I mean, we'll get into a lot of this, is people who can
00:49:08
Speaker
Essentially, the organization that Tupra is running in your face tomorrow, the early version of it is showing up here. And what he wants are people who can see, who can look at another person and immediately know all about their lives. And that is something that is very much plainly stated by Tupra about Tomas, that Tomas is completely incapable of doing, that he cannot see, that he is not useful in that. He's great at being an agent in the field and
00:49:37
Speaker
becoming a new person and executing orders and running a mission, but he cannot look at someone else and immediately tell you everything about them. Well, not only everything about their lives, but also predict how they're going to react and act.
00:49:55
Speaker
in future situations. And this gets back to, I guess, our empty suit discussion, because compared to Tubera, Thomas Nevinson is in a way just a mimic, right? He can assume any personality and any accent and speaks fluently, you know, eight, nine, ten languages. But yeah, he doesn't have
00:50:25
Speaker
He doesn't have that complex analytical determinative mind, I think, that Chupa has. And you're right. Gee, I guess in some ways I wish there was more Chupa in this book. And in every way, I wish we had 20 more years of Javier Marais and maybe we would have had four more Chupa novels.
00:50:52
Speaker
Right, Tupra as his George Smiley running throughout, which, I mean, Lekare is the obvious comp in some ways to the kind of novel that he's doing here in a way. Not very cleanly, but similarly, I think. I wanted to actually just highlight one. This is a little bit of a tangent, but towards the end of the novel,
00:51:17
Speaker
There's a paragraph, if you have your copy nearby, page 570, where he's thinking about a time that... So, Tomás is thinking back to...
00:51:31
Speaker
instances in his past where women had had so much that women he'd been with had so much to drink that they'd fully blacked out and then asked him the next day if anything had happened or that sort of thing. But the way he says it is Centurion had never resorted to using such methods himself but he had in his time been with two different women on two separate occasions both of whom had drunk so heavily one night that a few days later and so on and so on. What I found so interesting about that is that
00:52:00
Speaker
given the kind of work that Nevinson has done over his career, he's got to be talking about different missions, but he's assigning the name Centurion to those other people, when that would absolutely not have been his name in either instance. So he's kind of created this entirely different, this different self. There is a different self, or at least he, I don't know if he's forming it in this moment or retroactively forming it,
00:52:28
Speaker
But one of the things you ask is whether or not Nevinson evolves in this novel. And I think he does, purely within the sense of evolution as a change over time, not necessarily a change towards anything greater or what have you, but just changing. And I think that as much as he physically changed over his 20 years as an agent in 10 years in hiding or how the timeline works out,
00:52:57
Speaker
He didn't change as a person. He was an amber, constantly taking on new identities, occasionally popping back into the world as Thomas Nevinson. But really, there wasn't a different person operating there. There was no progression, no change as to who Thomas Nevinson was. And by the end of this novel, I think he has changed into something else. And in some ways, I think he's become a Thomas Nevinson, a much more
00:53:27
Speaker
a much more substantial or as substantial as he can become of a person. Why do you think that? I think partially because of his refusal to finish the job. I think because he wants to be back with Berta.
00:53:51
Speaker
It isn't just a matter of passing time, and this is just where their relationship is any longer. It seems to me he wants the relationship with his wife, not just with the woman he's been married to and has children with and still sees every so often and lives near. He's trying to reforge a relationship, but within the context of everything he's done previously,
00:54:19
Speaker
I don't know. I just feel like there is a change there and a movement back towards Berda. Berda does get the last word in this novel. She does. What you were just saying points back to what you said previously in that at the end, he wishes he were the Thomas Nevinson that was still back at Oxford before he got recruited.
00:54:47
Speaker
yeah my question to you about does he change wasn't necessarily is there a redemption here whatever you might think capital are redemption means which i agree with you i don't think there is but i guess i just. Was wondering what your thoughts were with you know whether we're seeing any kind of.
00:55:07
Speaker
of movement. And I think that you answered it well. And maybe you're making me doubt a little bit that this novel really wasn't something that Maria's needed to write. I mean, needed to write. I mean, in some ways, yeah.
00:55:25
Speaker
I mean, I like Berta. I think the way Berta thinks is fascinating. And that's a character that you watched just change throughout that novel, become different people over time while still having a certain core. And I do agree with you that a lot of the Ruon
00:55:50
Speaker
portion dragged. I mean, I think in some
Narrative Style and Thematic Depth
00:55:53
Speaker
ways that's the nature of that town. It seems like the kind of place where
00:55:59
Speaker
years can slip by, which would make it a perfect hideout for someone trying to go underground, of course. There are definitely portions of that where I got to a point of like, okay, we've had this thought process a few times already. Let's keep this moving. Let's move on to the next bit. He seemed to be marking time throughout. It's not a short book. It's 600 plus pages.
00:56:25
Speaker
I don't know. There are others of his books that I almost felt like could have been longer. If this one got 600, obviously, A Heart So White is not short, but it's a pretty lean machine that works incredibly well, so maybe it doesn't need to be longer. But I wouldn't mind spending more time in that person's head.
00:56:49
Speaker
It would be interesting to understand how much of Maria's later works
00:57:02
Speaker
were edited and whether or not if they were, whether there was some kind of concession here that he's not around to approve edits or cuts or anything. So maybe we just leave it. I don't know what the timing was in terms of how finished the Spanish manuscript was at the point that he died. Well, I mean, it was already out in Spain at that point, wasn't it? Perhaps it was.
00:57:32
Speaker
But I mean, your point about how much editing was still taking place for him is, I think, a really good one. I don't know. There were moments in this novel and just sort of the thought process that was going on. I don't even want to attribute it to Thomas. The way it was written felt old.
00:57:54
Speaker
It felt like the writings of someone who was trying to lay out what they thought of the world. It almost felt more directly, I don't know, in some ways it felt more directly like Marius was trying to speak directly to the reader in a much bolder way than he has in his other work.
00:58:18
Speaker
less of the complications and more of the, this is how the world has changed, and casting some judgments on that. There are always three instances of him talking about how much more civilized it was in the 90s when you could smoke indoors, which, you know, okay, sure, have your idea. A little bit self-serving, perhaps. A little bit.
00:58:46
Speaker
Just listening to you now reminded me of something that you mentioned at the beginning, and that is these seemingly very generalized
00:58:59
Speaker
It's almost digressions, but it's how the book starts with the discussion about Hitler and the people that had an opportunity to kill Hitler. There's a big discussion about beheadings and people choosing to be standing while they were beheaded or kneeling. I think was it Marie Antoinette or I forget who Anne Boleyn? Well, both come up.
00:59:27
Speaker
ambulance in particular, he goes on about how she was her head was laid down. Yeah, all that. Yeah, it was.
00:59:36
Speaker
It felt like it took 50 pages to really, for the story to get moving. And then even though the scene with Tupra seemed to be in some ways interminable, but it was very enjoyable because of all the humor and just, Tupra's just a fascinating character. But then again, like I said, I felt like it got boggy when they were in Ruan and maybe
01:00:05
Speaker
You're right. Maybe that was absolutely intentional because the cadence of the place being a smaller town where everyone knows everyone was just slower. I don't know. It pains me to default this book because it's his last one. Like you, he's such a seminal author in my life.
01:00:35
Speaker
I think I'd say just if I had to give a general statement that this one didn't really live up to my expectation, unfortunately. I would tend to agree with that. Having said that, there are many writers working right now that this would be one of their peaks as a novel. There's still so many. He's still such
01:01:02
Speaker
an amazing stylist. And when he gets on to a really good thought thread, the digressions and the pages just flow and are so gorgeous and so engaging and interesting. But I do think it doesn't, there's something about it that just doesn't quite work and it isn't
01:01:27
Speaker
it is not quite to the level of the other work. And I mean, I said before we started recording that I thought as a novel, like structurally, this one might work a little better than Berta, just because I felt like the scene that the revelation of how Tom Nevinsen gets pulled into the Secret Service felt like such a deus ex machina to me that it really like off-kilter that novel. But as we've been talking about it,
01:01:54
Speaker
Even with that, Berta, it's also, well, it's also frankly just that Berta is a much more interesting character than Tom Nevinson. She's thoughtful and reflective in a way that is engaging. Tom spends a lot of time and, you know, I mean, I mentioned how much the Shakespeare shows up throughout here and the repetition of that Elliot and all that.
01:02:21
Speaker
On the one hand, that's interesting. On the other hand, it could simply be that, yeah, again, I think I already said this, it could simply be that Tom Nevinson just can't quite grasp it. So it keeps rattling around his head. So he keeps thinking the same thoughts and pondering the same quandaries that others like Tuprah would have dispensed with quite some time ago.
01:02:45
Speaker
Well, I want to absolutely agree with you. I would be very hard pressed if someone came into my bookstore tomorrow to give them a novel that was published this year that I think is better than Thomas Nevinson.
01:03:03
Speaker
My expectations for this novel are based upon this sky-high pinnacle that I put Robert Marais on. You're right. He's better than 99.999% of all the writers out there, I think.
01:03:20
Speaker
I would never pick this as his best novel, and I don't know that you would either. But having said that, gee, who's coming out with a better novel this year? It would be tricky. Yeah, it's going to be interesting when we get to your Face Tomorrow episodes, where we get to hang out with Bertie Tupra again a bit and really get into the Maria's
01:03:49
Speaker
The Maria is at full throttle, full speed, height of his powers, writing a very different kind of a spy novel, ghost story, what have you. And I think in our very next episode, though, we're going to be talking about, I think, what might be my favorite other than Your Face Tomorrow. And that is Thus Bad Begins. I love that novel.
01:04:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about that one. It is not my favorite, so it'll be fun to kind of dig into that a bit. I mean, it's great. It's just, it's not my top one. I think, I don't know, probably sounds a little basic to say, but I think a heart, outside of your face tomorrow, I think a heart so white might be my favorite. A heart so white are all souls, but all souls just occupy such a special place in my heart, because it was the first one I read.
01:04:44
Speaker
I understand why Moreus is probably best known, at least internationally, for A Heart So White. Because in a lot of ways, it is kind of the perfectly structured, reasonably sized novel.
01:05:07
Speaker
It probably requires someone that really loves Maria's to get through what the fifteen hundred pages of all three volumes of your face tomorrow might be even be more than fifteen hundred pages but. That's a lot that's a lot of Maria's and a lot of the same set of characters to be following you know through through a trilogy.
01:05:30
Speaker
So yeah, our heart's so white is really great, but I do love Thus Bed Begins. And it's such an intriguing, I think, set of characters in that book too. And a little bit of a different... I think we talked in the bio section about how Marius was
01:05:50
Speaker
very much into film and his uncle, I think was a filmmaker. So this gets into that film aspect too, which I think was very interesting.
01:06:03
Speaker
I have to say, we made the choice to change up the order of things because we were going to go somewhat chronologically. Our initial idea for this project was to go somewhat chronologically through Maria's work with some detours along the way. But switching things up and doing Berta Isla and Thomas Emmonson now and saving your face tomorrow for the end, I think in some ways, I think it does Maria's work justice. I think it's also
01:06:31
Speaker
because I don't think either one of us love Thomas Nevinson the way we love some of his other work. It's nice not to end on this one, which I think maybe sounds a little coarse, but yeah, a really fascinating work and representative of a lot of Maria's concerns and maybe more
01:06:56
Speaker
broadly representative of his own personal beliefs and philosophy, but not his greatest work, I don't think by any means.
01:07:12
Speaker
I
Influences and Political Undertones
01:07:13
Speaker
feel like we're getting to the wrapping up point, but one thing I did want to mention is that he does bring, so on top of all the Shakespeare that comes in and his character quoting one of his own novels and the T.S. Eliot and so on and so on, he also brings Guillermo Cabrera and Fante into the novel.
01:07:39
Speaker
And I don't know that, I don't believe I mentioned this in the bio, bio portion, but Marius was very, very close with Cabrera and Fontay. He was one, have you read any Cabrera and Fontay's work? I have not, can you explain a little bit who he is?
01:07:55
Speaker
Guillermo Cabrera Infante was a Cuban writer. He also actually worked as a diplomat. He was a diplomat for the Castro regime and in many ways backed that revolution. But as the revolution moved into some of its more excesses, turned against it and lived out the majority of his life in Madrid in exile.
01:08:19
Speaker
He also played a pretty, as I understand it, a pretty significant role in the lives of a number of young Spanish writers, including Marius, who is part of that circle. Cabrera Infante was a Duke of Redonda and died, I think, in the 2000s, if I remember correctly.
01:08:44
Speaker
One of his, I mean, his great work, which I'm not even an attempt to do in the Spanish, translates to three trap tigers. And it's been, you know, it gets the usual the Cuban Ulysses sort of take, but it is this explosive. It is such a wild, wildly language driven
01:09:12
Speaker
bombastic novel of Havana that is just it's thrilling like it took me two tries to get into it simply because the voice at first I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on and I just felt like all right step back let's try this again in a few weeks um but once you get into the rhythm of it my god it's an impressive impressive novel but um
01:09:40
Speaker
He actually has Nevinson as having met Cabrera Infante at one point. Under the guise, I believe, of a novelist, I believe he says. Bear with me one second while I locate it. But basically, it's Cabrera Infante reflecting on
01:10:05
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of talk of fanaticism, dogma, religiosity throughout this novel, which makes sense given the work that Nevinson is involved in. So yeah, so Nevinson approached the Anglo-Cuban writer, Cabrera Infante, as he describes him, saying he'd been living in exile actually in London.
01:10:36
Speaker
But this is Cabrera Infante discussing what he calls terrorists, those supposedly idealistic liberators who are first and foremost clever cunning killers.
01:10:49
Speaker
All those people, young and old, who adorned their walls with that Che Guevara poster, as if he were Elvis or the Immaculate Conception, have chosen not to find out what he was like in real life. And they cover their ears, if you tell them, and look at you as if you were a worm. After all, that's where the Castro regime had their international acolytes call us. Isn't it? Gusanos. And then he goes on for quite a bit, talking about the liberators, the terrorists, as he refers to them, and how they had a taste for blood.
01:11:19
Speaker
In terms of, again, Marius speaking directly to us, I think him bringing in one of his mentors who had such a very specific and personal interaction with revolution and with what throughout the novel would be considered a form of dogma and fanaticism to have him dropped in like that.
01:11:44
Speaker
I think is him tipping his hand, and that's something that I don't think Marius does too often in his other books. I think he engages, I think he poses questions, and I think his characters make decisions, but I don't think that Marius necessarily is speaking directly to us in his other books the way he is in this one.
01:12:07
Speaker
So by including that passage that you just read, are you thinking that Marius is addressing the reader in terms of saying that in some instances, violence is justified?
01:12:25
Speaker
No, I mean, I think I think Marius is in some ways defending the state here. OK. I think he is defending the idea of a social order and that the democratic process, while corrupted, corrupt, corruptible, corrupted, is is the way to move forward and that violent revolution
01:12:51
Speaker
no matter how it starts, doesn't go, doesn't end well, frankly. I mean, it strikes me as a, yeah, as sort of an institutionalist conservative viewpoint. So then would you take it a step further and saying that he, Moreus doesn't support
01:13:16
Speaker
the actions of the Basque separatist at the IRA, but that then he thinks that Tomas's mission was morally justified? I mean, put to it like that. Yeah, I mean, I think I think he would side with Tuprah that you make the decision and you move on. And I feel very strange
01:13:47
Speaker
discussing what I think one of the great novelists of the last however long, what his political beliefs were from his novels and the like. That's breaking, I think, a lot of rules. But I think this novel also broke quite a few of those rules and how he addressed
01:14:08
Speaker
how he addressed things, addressed choices, addressed actions. But yeah, I think
Conclusion and Future Discussions
01:14:14
Speaker
ultimately, Marius would largely agree with the notion that the realm, the state acting to nip things in the bud, as it were, is morally the right thing for them to do.
01:14:38
Speaker
I'm not quite sure how I feel about him saying that. That's a really interesting observation and a really interesting line of reasoning on your part, Tom, in terms of just the sources of the quotes, like the Infanta, the Cuban writer, to kind of connect those dots.
01:15:10
Speaker
Well, we can't ask Marais, unfortunately. No. And, you know, who knows if he's even willing to respond. But I do think
01:15:24
Speaker
Yeah, I know. I was a little bit of a, I mean, we have a lot more of his work to discuss, but I was a little bit of a coda on this one. I do think he left us with an incredible novels and fictions and writings that just give us so much insight and such an interesting toolbox for how people think and how
01:15:53
Speaker
how decisions are made and what we owe each other, a really interesting moral philosophy. And yeah, it's, yeah, it's been, this is me game modeling again. It's been somewhere than something of a privilege reading his work, I feel. I agree. A brilliant, brilliant mind and just a marvelous writer. I think it's going to be quite a while before we see another like him. Agreed.
01:16:24
Speaker
All right. We'll put away our tissues and our tears. And happily, we've still got some more books to talk about. Many, many more books to talk about and many more books with allusions to Shakespeare and Shakespeare and the titles and on and on. And it's going to continue to be very fun. Okay. Look forward to it, Tom. Bye, Lori.
01:16:53
Speaker
you