What Book to Read?

Some time ago I read and enjoyed Wilson’s A Small Death in Lisbon (1999), which combines a present day investigation by Inspector Zé Coelho into the death of a young woman, and art theft by the Nazis in World War II. I thought the writing good and the plot clever. With The Hidden Assassins (2006), I expected another Coelho story. Wrong. Not even the same country. This book features Inspector Javier Falcón, is set in Seville, and is the third of a quartet of novels, all of which deal with different investigations, while having common threads running throughout. And while I would have done better to start at the beginning of the series with The Blind Man of Seville (2003), I still found the book gripping – if not quite as good as my first venture with Wilson.

After a brief preface set in London (the relevance of which only becomes clear at the end), the story begins with Javier investigating the discovery of a corpse mutilated so as to obscure its identity. But before he can really get started on the case, a bomb destroys an apartment block which has a mosque in its basement, and all of Seville’s resources are concentrated on dealing with what appears to be a terrorist attack. The story then introduces several other characters whose activities are also followed throughout the book. Some of these would be familiar to readers of the earlier books in the series; they would more quickly recognise the significance of their relationships with Javier than I did. I think understanding these relationships would have helped make him a more rounded character, though it is not necessary for the plot. The story is quite complex, with various red herrings and dead ends in the investigation, as well as mysterious issues of national security. Are the investigators jumping too quickly to conclusions? Some issues are left unresolved; I assume they are addressed in the final book of the series, The Ignorance of Blood (2009).

Even without the deeper knowledge of his background built up in the earlier novels, Javier is a likeable enough character. He is a loner, divorced from his wife and yearning to renew a relationship that ended in a previous book. He is good at his job, and doesn’t seem to have conflicts with his colleagues or superiors. He feels he is now operating too much on instinct: ‘He’d been such a scientific investigator in the past … Now he spent more time tuning in to his intuition. He tried to persuade himself that is was experience but sometimes it seemed like laziness.’ But he breaks the case by the application of logic to the confusion in a quite satisfying way.

The story is also about the effect that terrorism can have on individuals and whole cities. Wilson takes as his epigraph lines from Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. Even before the bomb, Javier feels anxious: ‘His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new.’  Another character feels ‘the building’s collapse was an appalling replication of her own mental state’. The press and the public all too readily abandon the tolerance that used to characterise Seville and jump to the conclusion that the bomb was the work of Islamic terrorists. Many respond with demands that Moroccans and other North Africans now living in Spain be expelled. ‘They live with me, they live in my society, they enjoy its prosperity, until one day they decide to put a bomb under my apartment,’ says one of the survivors. ‘And now it is we who are angry.’  Javier struggles to make sense of it. Who benefits by such dislocation? Wilson is making a welcome point about Western and Islamic relations through the way he resolves this story.

Having said all that, I find it hard to put my finger on what it is about this book that disappoints me. I think it must be Wilson’s use of language. There’s nothing wrong with it; it just doesn’t rise above the perfectly adequate. I probably will go back and read the others in the series to see if they have more of the sparkle I thought I found in the first book of Wilson’s that I read.

You can find more about Robert Wilson and his books here.