Have sword, will travel
By STEPHEN SMITH
Saturday, May 21, 2005
Captain Alatriste
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Putnam, 272 pages,
Captain Diego Alatriste is a swordsman for hire, bold and brave and with a blade that's as swift as wind. Down on his luck, with a complicated notion of what's right, he's a creature of 17th-century Spain rather than Middle Earth, but I don't know, something about the swash of his buckle reminds me of Aragorn, with his low-boil, king-in-waiting air, from the moviefication of The Lord of the Rings.
Which is good, I guess, because that's who they've got to play him, Viggo Mortensen, for the movie they're making in the south of Spain right now. With a budget of €22-million (about $35-million), it's the biggest production ever mounted in Spain. Director Agustín Díaz Yanes sounds as excited as you'd expect him to be. In a recent newspaper interview, he said that the movie he's making is going to bring Golden Age Spain in all its glory and decadence. He says it's going to be "hyper-realistic," "raw" and "naked." So we've got that to look forward to.
And the book? A bit of background first. Arturo Pérez-Reverte is the former war correspondent in print and on Spanish TV who, since leaving reporting behind in 1994, has published nearly 20 books. They include memoirs and collections of essays, but with novels like The Queen of the South, The Flanders Panel and The Seville Communion, he's made a specialty of the taut and smart (not to mention bestselling) thriller. New as he is to the screen and the English-language page, Alatriste first made an appearance in 1996, and Pérez-Reverte has published four more novels. Go to Spain and you'll find Alatriste bursting out all over, in comic-book versions for young readers and in guided tours of Madrid for those who feel the need to follow in the imaginary footsteps of a hero who never was.
So. The book. The year is 1623. It's a lively time in Spain, the era of the painter Diego Velàzquez, of poets and playwrights in the order of Lope de Vega and Francisco de Quevedo. (Cervantes has only been dead seven years.) Felipe IV, not yet 20, sits on the throne, but it's the formidable man who just stands just behind, the Conde de Olivares, who wields real power. Abroad, Spain is mired along with the rest of Europe in the Thirty Years War. That's where Alatriste made his name, on the battlefields of Flanders, with gallant acts in causes as hopeless as they were bloody. For a narrator, we get a young Basque boy, Iñigo Balboa, whose father fought with Alatriste in Flanders and died in the doing, whereupon Alatriste vowed to look after the boy.
Back in Madrid, tending his wounds, Alatriste is as good as his word. Unable to pay his debts, he's also in jail, leaving 13-year-old Iñigo to fend for himself. As the story begins, Alatriste is freed. Penniless, he sells what he can: his skill with a sword. Before long, he's joined another bravo in taking on a lucrative job waylaying a pair of English travellers due to arrive in Madrid a few nights' hence. The captain doesn't like the smell of the thing: The men who hire him wear masks and they can't seem to agree on whether it's a simple scare the foreign heretics need or if they would they be better murdered in their boots.
The deed itself only complicates matters. On a point of honour, Alatriste calls off the attack, sparing the Englishmen and sending his own partner scurrying away muttering about vengeance. Alatriste soon learns the identity of the younger of his intended victims: He's the young Prince of Wales, come to woo the king's sister. Who wants him dead? Why? It's not hard to guess what happens next: Gallantry ensues, swords are drawn and treachery uncovered, not to mention perfidy. Ambushes result, along with perilous escapes etc.
It's all good stuff, set against a vivid and often murky Madrid that feels alive and authentic. Is it hyper-realistic, raw and/or naked? No. That's the movie. The novel is brisk and bawdy, and Pérez-Reverte writes with panache and pacing, abetted by his translator, Margaret Sayers Peden, in exactly the way a translator wants to do her abetting: by going unnoticed.
So why aren't I as enthusiastic as I thought I'd be? Is Alatriste not an absorbingly complex character? Yes. Do I not love swordplay as much as the next tío? I do. Am I not an all-around sucker for all things Spanish, especially literary and historical? Claro.
All I can tell you, then, is that the intrigue in Captain Alatriste isn't as intriguing as it could be. The whodunit and the whydunit don't, in the end, take a lot of working out. There's also the problem of the natural slackness that comes with the first book in an ongoing series. A great many characters are introduced in Captain Alatriste, and lots of scenes are set. I guess you've got to do it, lay your foundations, but taking the longer view can throw off the dramatic balance of the book at hand, too. It doesn't have to, but it can. And Captain Alatriste does feel top-heavy in a way that a book like Master and Commander, the opening salvo in Patrick O'Brien's celebrated series of naval novels, never does.
But then, nor are Iñigo and Alatriste as instantly compelling a pair as O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin. Maybe that's the trouble underlying the novel more than any other: a lack of intimacy, of emotional and intellectual give and take between the 13-year-old Iñigo and the battered loner of an old soldier. The boy can follow the man, chronicle his deeds, revere him and lend a blade in a fight, but he can't cross the distances of age and experience, wisdom and desire.
Then again, it's early days for these two. Pérez-Reverte's publishers are keeping him coming in English, promising a book a year through 2009. I'm willing to wait and see what develops.
Stephen Smith is a Toronto literary journalist with an abiding interest in Spain and its literature.
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