After finishing Marias’ novel, the third of his I have now read, I sought out some commentary, mostly Anglo-Saxon. There was praise, but there was also criticism. Notably from McCrum in the Guardian, who wrote: “The problem is simple: Thus Bad Begins is far too long. Vanity is the thing that kills successful writers and too much of Marías’s 14th novel reads like a self-conscious parody of earlier work. It is, as Hamlet might say, a bad case of “words, words, words”. So: countless elegant, and serpentine, sentences, sinuous meditative passages mixed with provocative paradoxes, but not enough substance.”
I quote McCrum in order to open up some kind of dialectic between Anglo-Saxon literary trends and, let us say, Hispanic literary trends. Because., and one hopes Marias might agree, it is precisely the words, words, words which lend Thus Bad Begins its remarkable power. The narrative as such is banal, even melodramatic, as the author himself suggests. Literature is made up of banal stories, which are little more than the warp and woof of everyday gossip. A man is cruel to his wife. His wife is unfaithful. Another man, a confidant of the husband, sleeps with the wife. There is nothing new under the sun (or as Marias prefers, beneath the light of the moon). What distinguishes this tawdry story, is the author’s capacity to extort shards of moonlight, which shine through his purple prose, and which reveal that the reason the story has some bearing in his hands is because it tells us something about the banality and the exceptionality of our own lives.
As such McCrum’s vapid criticism seems to gloss over at least one of the most brilliant passages I can recall reading. One where Marias talks about the moon and rumour and Shakespeare. His narrator, whose shallowness as a character within the story is beautifully shadowed by his nagging wisdom as a narrator, recounting the story twenty years later, succeeds in elevating this banal tale to another level altogether. Only, and here’s the rub, it isn’t quite so banal, because this is also a tale about evil, about vile acts, and how we compartmentalise our lives and learn to accept this evil, letting it seep into our everyday normality, even accepting that this evil should be rewarded, both in financial and affective forms. Setting the story in 1980, shortly aft4r the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Marias’ tale highlights the way that those who profited and indeed were permitted to indulge their vices under Franco’s regime were never brought to justice, were never forced to come to terms with their actions. Society turned a blind eye (Muriel, the film producer at the heart of the story, is literally one-eyed), and the perpetrators found a way to carry on doing their thing. The relevance of this scenario echoes today in the country where I am writing; and in the articles upon the release of the novel in the USA, many noted that it came out just as Trump was about to ascend to the presidency. In a world of Epstein and Trump and Manini Rios and Bolsonaro, it’s not just the monsters that need to be taken into account, it’s all those who benefitted from society’s’ reluctance to look evil in the face, to allow it to “get away with it”.
There are other layers of subtlety to the novel. Notably in the way it treats Muriel’s misogyny towards his wife, Beatriz, a misogyny which leads to tragedy. Marias must be aware that this will alienate his female readership. The narrator, De Vere’s, lackadaisical criticism of his boss’ misogyny will also be held against him, not to mention his actions. As such, Marias would appear to be seeking to vilify a whole generation, using a stiletto rather than an axe. De Vere pardons and even effectively condones Muriel’s cruelty, just as Muriel pardons and effectively condones Van Vechten’s vice. The tendrils of fascism reach out and corrupt everything, even the country’s finest sons. It’s a cold-eyed vision, one which is stitched into an Ellroy-ian interperation of power, offered by the remarkable sub-plot of the real life US producer Harry Dean Towers and his relationship with actors such as Herbert Lom and Jack Palance. For anyone of my generation, the extended scene with Herbert Lom is one of the most amusing. unlikely but ultimately plausible scenes you will ever read.
Marias’ novel is not bite-sized. It is vast, sweeping, ambitious. It is composed of a glory of words, words which rush up against the reader like the relentless tide. Words which have the fluency and power of the tide. Thus Bad Begins is a remarkable achievement, a devastating vision of the sweeping infiltration of vile deeds and rumour into the warp and woof of civil society.
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