Thus Bad Begins
Javier Marías
[Penguin]
Thus Bad Begins, this 16th book from Javier Marías, gets straight to the point. Being a Marías novel, it will inevitably circle around to knotty, uncertain stories of secrecy, duplicity, and manipulation, told through looped language webs of obsessive digression and rumination. And so Marías wastes no time, opening his novel with a bonanza of these themes: a lengthy cryptic conversation in which bourgeois Madrileño filmmaker Eduardo Muriel entrusts his young assistant, Juan De Vere, with investigating the hidden past of a celebrated doctor who curiously seems to have benefited from both the Civil War and its aftermath. It is 1980, and Marías invokes a Madrid giddy with forgetting.
The author’s loose, sprawling syntax, as cerebral and claustrophobically reflective as ever, tends towards both aesthetic and explanatory overkill. But Marías’ skill in evoking the visual and physical qualities of this world is evident. A novel indebted to the world of cinema, there is a noir, filmic quality to the prose throughout, that gels well with the oppressive environments of the narrator’s mind and domestic space. Finally, in the complex economy of indebtedness, loyalty and pretence that comprise a wounded Spain rebuilding itself, both narrator and reader are made shameless voyeurs. As we witness the murky betrayals the book’s characters try to disavow, we are granted a disturbing view of what is traded in the exchange of truth for new beginnings.
Words: Gillian Moore
