posted on 30 Nov 2022

Even the Darkest Night by Javier Cercas

Cercas is perhaps best associated with thoughtful and emotionally complex novels about the consequences of the Spanish Civil War and the way it split a country and its people into conflicting camps that still have not wholly reconciled. Cercas is the kind of novelist who understands that people were forced into terrible decisions that would haunt their later years and his novel,The Soldiers of Salamis, is a minor masterpiece in my opinion.

Even the Darkest Night represents something of a new direction for Cercas and is the first in what is a planned series of novels featuring the ex-convict and now police detective, Melchior Marin. We’ve become used to the idea of the police detective who harbours deep and dark personal demons or secrets but they are all dwarfed by Marin’s past - a childhood of wilful neglect, petty crime and ultimately imprisonment for his involvement with a Columbian drug cartel. 

It is while in prison that Marin sees a new future for himself when he comes under the spell of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables - and specifically the character of the police inspector Javert who Marin sees as a “false bad guy.”  When he eventually leaves prison and qualifies to join the police he suddenly finds himself the hero of a sting operation and is promoted to work in the region of Terra Alta. When an elderly printing magnate and his wife are found brutally murdered and their bodies viciously cut to ribbons, Marin becomes obsessed with the case even though his superiors seem eager to put the whole thing on ice.

We discover that the root of Marin’s determination to stay involved with the crime lies in his still conflicted feelings about the unsolved murder of his prostitute mother. And, of course, this refusal to let go of the case rebounds on him and both he and his family are put in danger - fatally as it turns out.

I don’t want to say any more about the plot or the resolution of the case but it should come as no surprise that the echoes of the Spanish Civil War find their way into what is - I’m afraid to say - a rather prosaic ending. But in truth the focus of this book isn’t the detective story at all but the backstory of Marin which is unravelled at some length.

I think we can look at this book as laying the foundation for what Cercas is hoping will be a longer-running series of Terra Alta novels featuring the damaged and haunted Melchior Marin. I must confess that although it is wonderfully written (I don’t think Cercas can write in any other way), I find myself less than convinced by the main character’s back story which piles one agony on top of another.

Cercas wouldn’t be the first literary novelist to turn to detective fiction as a way, perhaps, of relaxing and widening their reading base but if that’s at the expense of novels as superb as The Soldiers of Salamis or The Speed of Light then it’s a great loss.

The book is now available in paperback and you will be able to get a copy for under £10.

 

Terry Potter

December 2022