Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí

The situation at the start of this prize-winning Spanish novel is an attention-grabber. The narrator Victor Francés is a divorcee having dinner with a married woman of very recent acquaintance whose husband is away on business in London. They move to the bedroom where an unexpected angle to Victor's adventure transpires; she dies in his arms.

V and I started reading it together, but she was quickly put off by Marías' highly digressive narrative style (aka "mamadas"). The trouble is that Victor is the sort of narrator that is not only telling his story, he's also telling the story of his story. Yet in spite of the rambles, there was a strong enough thread of mystery and suspense to keep pulling me along, though this perhaps also set up some false expectations about where the story was actually going.

I came to enjoy the way the author's prose manifests Victor's habit of entertaining himself with his own thoughts and his sensitivity to life's might-dos and would-haves, revealed as a tendency to pan out of his immediate perceptions to speculate on ambient possibility - things that may or may not have happended or be happening: "Pensar en lo que no sucedió ha de ser parte de mí".

At first, some of these speculations do appear to be "mamadas" but the longer you read on the more you realise that these apparent imaginings often reflect experience of actual events that Victor will later relate to us. There are two desgracias, two sudden, ridiculous deaths, in this tale, one at each extremity, and Victor (only) knows about both of them from page one.

Marías has created a clever and very rich weave of themes and references. One of the most pivotal is that of haunting, a word that he (mysteriously) claims has no Spanish equivalent. (He does offer encantamiento, which is perhaps closer to our enchantment, but over in Guatemala they use the verb espantar to describe these rather territorial phantasmal behaviours.) Victor himself is a ghost ("un negro fantasma") in the real sense that he ghosts speeches for others. Yet even before he was left in a state of enchantment by the events of that night, he was leading the solitary, near invisible existence he himself associates with Volkswagen Golf drivers, and it's a state of isolation that appears to impact on his ethical choices.

Victor jokes that people like himself tend to turn on the TV when they walk into their apartments to check what has happened in the world during their absence, when in fact their absence from it is "perpetual". In this story it is the living that behave like shades with unfinished business.

There are parts which are less than fully satisfactory (such as the mid-section digression in which Victor can't make up his mind whether the streetwalker he has in his car is his ex-wife Celia) but I ended up with a strong sense of goodwill to the work as a whole. It is a fascinating exploration of deception: how we deceive and are deceived in turn, and one which characterises the world of the actual as fundamentally unstable and inexplicable on all temporal levels − past, present and future.

Incidentally, although Marías has a solid reputation as an anglophile, the London of this novel is a routine place of red Routemasters and black cabs, drizzle and downpours, business hotels with shared toilets and concierges that make a mess of Spanish names.