All Souls (Vintage International)

Of course, as every Catholic school child learns, Halloween (All Hallows Eve) is the night that precedes All Souls Day, November 1. At first I thought that Marias would play off that factoid in his novel, but no, he simply plays off the name of one of the colleges at Oxford and tries to make what is an academic novel into something more universal, a study of the meaning of life, no less.To an extent he is successful. As a former college English professor myself, I have always found the campus or academic novel an excruciating and ultimately unsatisfying sub-genre. College profs and college mores are much too obvious a butt of fun and derision, and hurling scorn and bile at them is like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel. Why bother? Who cares anyway? But Marias does not go at it like Kingsley Amis, for instance does in Lucky Jim, where Amis skewers one and all with dripping irony. Marias obviously was stifled and appalled by his own two year stint at Oxford, and he lets us know it, but he is a much more subtle writer than Amis.The Oxford dons, male and female, are empty, ghostly, not fully alive. They are a distressing, self-indulgent, finicky, egotistic lot, and Marias calls them for it in ever so soft a voice. I was never so fortunate as to attend Oxford although I have always admired it and Cambridge from a distance, but Marias to the extent he can be believed, quenches whatever regret the aspirant scholar might feel for not being among the elect. The Oxford characters are simply passing the time between appointment and death with dinners, affairs, eaves dropping, scandal mongering and the like. There is no regard for scholarship, and certainly none for teaching. The undergraduates are simply shadowy figures scuttling to and from the dining tables and the town discotheques. Only at the discos do our Narrator and other dons engage the great unwashed from the environs around the colleges and the surrounding countryside.But academe is not the major topic of the book, even if it is set in the town of Oxford. The theme is death and how to cope with the thought of it, with even a glimmer of an answer to the question of how to make life worthwhile in the "weak turning wheel" that is life on earth before the awful day one enters the realm of souls, leaving the land of the living, as we all must do, even the learned gentlemen and ladies of Oxford. But Oxford does not seem to be the place to do it.The Spanish narrator, who must be something like Marias, is an unreliable one, but still the most impressive figure in the book. He marks time for his two years but is increasingly repelled by the emptiness around him. Even his long love affair with Clare is ultimately dissatisfying. The Oxfordians are interesting to observe, but they give each other nothing. Perhaps why so many of them were spies in the Second World War. They are intelligent but inscrutable. As the narrator says at the death of one, their deaths are neither momentous nor especially impressive. A sad verdict indeed.Note: you will be scratching your head when you get to the middle of the book and Marias starts in on the Kingdom of Redonda, an uninhibited rock in the Carribean, and the bloke who was once King of it--Marias is now--and there are even two pictures of that gentleman, Mr. Gaumsworthy, in the book. Don't give up on or forget the pictures. They help tie the three sections of the work together at the end. In order not to spoil things, I say no more.This is the second Marias I have read, the first being A Heart So White. While this work was the first of Marias's to cause a major stir, it is not equal to Heart So White or I believe to others I have waiting for me on the chair opposite my desk. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable read. If you want to see Oxford, this is an inexpensive way to do it, and there is open enrollment.To conclude, one throwaway sentence capsulizes Marias's attitude toward the place his narrator escaped to find marriage and family and a larger life back in Madrid. The River Isis flows through Oxford. As Marias remarks, this river is called the Thames always and everywhere--except in Oxford.

I found two basic levels to explore in Marias' work, All Souls. The first is I give hats off to his amazing mastery of the written form and conversational style. He pushes the boundaries of fiction in interesting ways. He almost completely dispenses with traditional paragraphs. With a lessor author this would be a disaster. With Marias it is a pleasure. He is an exact constructionist with delicate style. His protagonist has such a natural voice it seems as if you're having coffee with the character, not reading about him. He has the ability to develop a sense of conversational intimacy that I have not seen bettered. HIs work is fluid and graceful and an example of superb technical mastery. The second level, that of plot, left me unsatisfied. He is a plot minimalist (at least here,) and very few things actually happen. What does happen is small stuff involving personal peccadilloes, (not terribly interesting ones,) and on a larger scale, an exploration of what constitutes trust, love, companionship and personal honesty. The story takes place in Oxford and is a study of the life of a Spanish scholar who hooked a limited contract to teach at Oxford. Since Marias did teach in Oxford for a brief period, the 'outing' of academic big-wigs feels right and has an undoubted charm. Although I love his style of writing; intimate and conversational; I wish he had built something with more meat. It seemed rather anemic to this reader and two thirds through the book I had a nagging suspicion I wasn't enjoying it much. I also suspected the last third would be more of the same . . . and it was. There is much to be praised here. Marias is always charming and erudite, and as I mentioned, a technical genius -- All Souls is just not much of a plot.

But not fulfiñling in any deep way. It makes life at Oxford seem essentially lifeless with petty dons whose lives are empty and lonely and who can't communicate on a real human level. It is a depressing book. Enen the affair the Spanish professor has seems dull. A way to pass the time, at least for the females, but the Spanish professor retains some passion, and indeed falls in love, but that's too messy for his beloved who is obsessed with her mother's suicide back in India when she was a child. This event connects in a fascinating way with the old books the professor collects as a pastime. The long paragraphs swallow the reader up in the hazy and lifeless world that Oxford seems to be in this novel. People die but it doesn't seem to matter much because essentially they were spiritually dead even when they were technically alive. They really seemed to have no purpose in life. Even their students seem like a major inconvenience. The book is neither the inferno nor the paradiso -- it's limbo. There is time, but no growth. Everyone is stuck in a relatively meaningless existence. The humor of of the high table professorial dinners is hilarious. All these academic luminaries prove to be little more than a pack of lust-driven, vicious, pedantic, small-minded fools. The narrator was lucky to get back to Madrid, but unfortunately seems to have been infected by some of the deathly attitudes he had been steeped in while at Oxford. I'm glad I read it but relieved to be done with it.

While I liked this book, I preferred A Heart So White. I writing is beautiful and profound, yet the structure of the novel is meandering. There is no strong storyline so at times the book is slow. I am a huge fan of Marias and have enjoyed his other books more than All Souls which is highly touted. Perhaps someone who attended Oxford or Cambridge would enjoy this book more. I would read A Heart So White for a taste of Marias rather than All Souls. Still, any Marias is more rewarding than most of the other books out right now.

Marias at his best, making a mockery of Oxford and intellectuals.