The Infatuations, Javier Marías,

Hamish Hamilton, 352pp, £18.99 (hardback)

Early into The Infatuations, Javier Marías’s long awaited new novel, María Dolz, a publicist and our protagonist, declares that writers are, for the most part, ‘strange individuals’ for ‘you have to be slightly abnormal to sit down and work on something without being told to.’ Thankfully for us, Marías has continued to sit down, every time harnessing that abnormality to supreme effect to create richly mesmeric fiction. On this occasion, however, he has surpassed himself and produced a masterpiece.

For some time now María has been frequenting the same Madrid café for breakfast en route to her office. Every day she has observed a happy, handsome couple. One morning they fail to show and she finds herself deprived of her ‘morning filip’. Then, when browsing a newspaper, she happens upon a photograph of the man lying stabbed in the street. Disturbed by this seemingly unprovoked murder and strangely affected by an unknown woman’s loss, María seeks out the widow, offers her a shoulder to cry on and is fleetingly admitted into her world. But this brief encounter leads to an impetuous affair with the dead man’s best friend, one which forces her to question both the depth of her love and the nature of a crime.

To synopsise a Marías novel is always to trivialise it. Part of Marías’s genius is the way he fleshes out his bare-bones plots, satisfying his readers with mental nourishment. The Infatuations – expertly translated by Margaret Jull Costa – snares us from the outset with the image of the stabbed man, his shirt half off, and his last thoughts trickling from his mind. This is a customary Marías shock tactic: Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me opens with a woman dropping dead in her lover’s arms; A Heart So White begins with a woman who, shortly after her honeymoon, shoots herself in the heart – but not before unbuttoning her blouse for, as with our stab victim with his splayed shirt, each act of intent in Marías’s fiction, whether born of lust or hate, is ultimately passion driven and better executed with all impediments removed. In each book that jolting image is a lasting one, replayed and reinterpreted by those left behind, specifically those whose love has been interrupted, whose world is now in shards, and it is up to the survivors to make sense of these unanticipated dramas or traumas.

For a short time The Infatuations plays out like a murder mystery, right down to the corpse on the first page. But to slap this label on it is akin to calling Marías’s epic trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, a series of spy novels. Marías places a murder at the novel’s dark heart but proceeds to expand and illustrate wider, more complex, ramifications. After consoling Luisa, now as fragile as ‘a hesitant novice ghost’, María befriends and then falls for Javier, and it is at this point that the novel casts off its genre moorings and elevates itself into, if not a psychological thriller then at least, a compellingly shrewd study of human nature in all its warts-and-all glory. Javier talks in lengthy, uninterrupted blocks whereas María’s runaway thoughts coalesce into energised meditations; taken together, then, they equal Javier Marías, their creator and ventriloquist, who meshes her musings and his monologues on love, death, grief and the passing of time. Marías has been likened to, and indeed praised by, W. G. Sebald and the comparison is at its keenest when both characters are pouring forth their separate torrents of metaphysical ideas in long, reeling sentences and thick slab-like paragraphs. We revel in the digressions, delight at each ‘mental tongue-twister,’ lose ourselves in each dialectical bout.

But then Marías brings us back to earth with a bump. María overhears Javier discussing his friend’s murder with another man and all of a sudden the crime element is rekindled. Perhaps the senseless killing by a ‘barmy beggar’ was in fact ‘murder-by-delegation’ cleverly orchestrated by another party. María feels hoodwinked by a charming lover who may not be all he seems; the reader is dazzled and befuddled by an ingenious author’s trail of smoke and mirrors. Soon we are both compelled to reassess the piecemeal imparted truths that have come our way, sifting cerebral arguments and emotional avowals for traces of diabolical machinations. From debates such as whether post-death resembles pre-birth, a new, more urgent question-quandary materialises: what drastic measures would we take to win our true love?

And yet the novel is not all mind-games and seamy skullduggery. Marías regularly aerates his novels of ideas with farcical light relief – think the High Table dinner at the Oxford college in All Souls which steadily descends into chimps’ tea-party anarchy. There is an excellent scene here in which María is asked by an insufferable writer she represents to send him drugs for research purposes – ‘I want to see what colour cocaine is in daylight, so that I don’t get it wrong.’ Along with being abnormal, writers are ridiculed for their arrogance and self-replenishing fund of conceited whims. Marías, the literary maestro, also infuses his novel with real writers, having Javier quote Balzac and Dumas and decode Macbeth, another drama whose fateful repercussions stem from a murder.

We can search and scan and isolate the novel’s high points but Marías is especially generous this time around and has spread his artistry, giving us plenty to wonder at on virtually every page. There is one astonishing scene in which Javier slyly but pointedly probes María to determine whether she did in fact eavesdrop on an incriminating conversation. A lesser writer would overstress the requisite undertones of menace, but Marías employs his superior skills to perfectly calibrate the tension, stretching it to snapping point, and transfixes us with a bravura heart-stopping set-piece. Elsewhere, María casts herself as the dying man and imagines his final throes – effectively envisioning how it is to die. Characters are described at length, their physiognomy and quirks consuming entire pages, but as ever Marías is meticulous rather than prolix. Much is made of ‘anecdotal, insignificant’ characters (‘ancillary figures’ in All Souls), those ‘who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting’. And then there is the language, the glorious lyrical flurries that counterpoise each thoughtful soliloquy:

We cannot pretend to be the first of the favourite, we are merely what is available, the leftovers, the leavings, the survivors, the remnants, the remaindered goods, and it is on this somewhat ignoble basis that the greatest loves are built and on which the best families are founded, and from which we all come, the product of chance and making do, of other people’s rejections and timidities and failures, and yet we would give anything sometimes to stay by the side of the person we rescued from an attic or a clearance sale, or won in a game of cards or who picked us up from among the scraps.

Marías begins The Infatuations with a standard trope, and when we complete it and stand back to admire it, we realise that plot-wise it has a close relative in his earlier exploration of love, The Man of Feeling. But instead of being derivative, The Infatuations has the air of a novel, which taps into those that have preceded it, and then, inspired, galvanised, swerves off and develops in a strikingly original way. Marías scratches deeper below the surface than before and shines a sharper light on the hypocrisies and desires that mire and motivate the human condition. In doing so he shunts the modern novel down new avenues with fresh vistas and, crucially, no one within sight of overtaking. Cervantes gave us the first modern novel and four hundred years later his heir and compatriot is upholding that visionary prowess whilst working a whole different magic. ‘Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen,’ Javier tells María as Javier Marías time and again masterfully demonstrates.

One more quotation on fiction or fictitiousness merits mention to make a final point. We are told that María’s overweening writer has heard from his ‘Nordic spies’ that he has been tipped to win the Nobel, despite no one having publically put his name forward. He rehearses his acceptance speech and imagines it appearing in the world’s press the next day. María thinks it ‘enviable to have such confidence in a goal, even though both goal and confidence were fictitious.’ On the strength of a superlative back catalogue and this latest extraordinary novel, it is surely only a matter of time before fictitious rumours morph into clear-cut fact and Javier Marías gets the call from less clandestine Nordic sources to head to Stockholm to receive the prize he richly deserves.