Even the Darkest Night by Javier Cercas

Even the Darkest Night: A Terra Alta Novel
By Javier Cercas
Translated by Anne McLean
Knopf, 2022

In his 2014 book The Imposter, Spanish novelist Javier Cercas examined the case of Enric Marco, a fabulist who, before he was exposed, claimed he fought against Franco and was imprisoned in German concentration camps. To explain the motives of his disgraced subject, Cercas uses his country’s most famous book as a touchstone, styling Marco as an Alonso Quixano who wished he was Don Quixote.

Cercas, one of Spain’s leading men of letters, has probed historical memory and the Spanish Civil War in a number of books that straddle fiction and nonfiction. In “Soldiers of Salamis,” he explored a curious incident involving a leader of the Falange that took place near the war’s end. In “Lord of All the Dead,” he turned his lens on a family member who had fought on the Francoist side and died at the Battle of the Ebro in 1938.

With Even the Darkest Night, Cercas has written a different kind of book: a detective novel. The genre seems well-suited to Cercas, who often casts himself as a character in his books, narrating his investigations into murky historical territory. The book is the initial entry in a trilogy already published in Spain–and the first to appear in English. It begins in a gruesome fashion.

Melchor Marín is a policeman in Terra Alta, located in Catalonia. He’s sent to the home of Francisco Adell, a local business magnate who, along with his wife, Rosa, has been brutally tortured and murdered. (The couple’s Romanian maid has also been killed.) Translator Anne McLean, who rendered Soldiers of Salamis and Lord of All the Dead in English, captures the scene’s macabre horror: “Floating in the air is a violent smell of blood, of tormented flesh, of supplication, and a strange sensation, as if those four walls had preserved the howls of agony they’d witnessed.”

Alternating chapters detail the surprising story of how Melchor, tasked with finding out what befell the Adells, ended up in Terra Alta four years ago. The son of a Barcelona prostitute, young Melchor is a troubled youth who falls in with a Colombian cartel. He inevitably lands in jail, where he meets a literary minded Frenchman who serves up witty aphorisms–“deep down, French and Spanish are the same language: badly spoken Latin”–and turns Melchor onto Les Misérables.

Melchor is immediately taken with Hugo’s masterpiece–he will eventually name his daughter Cosette–and feels a curious kinship with Javert, the novel’s ostensible villain. Melchor considers Javert a “false bad guy,” a man of “generosity and adamantine purity [with] an idealistic, gentlemanly and single-minded zeal to protect those who lacked any other protection than the law.” Melchor follows Javert’s footsteps when he learns about the murder of his mother–and embarks on a career as a police officer.

Cercas does an admirable job in his first outing as a crime novelist teasing potential suspects. Who would wish such bodily harm on the elderly Adell couple? Could it be the old man’s long-serving second-in-command? What about his ne’er-do-well son-in-law, the managing director, generally seen as a dunce? Come to think of it, Melchor’s partner, a friend of the Adell family, seems a little too willing to play along when the powers-that-be try to shut down the case.

“Even the Darkest Night,” set in the shadow of big city Barcelona, is suffused with the terrain of Catalonia. Terra Alta, the site of the Battle of the Ebro, is “abrupt, barren, inhospitable, wild and isolated,” Melchor judges, “the ends of the earth.” The police station is located on the outskirts of Gandesa, Terra Alta’s capital. The local police are forced to bring in the Territorial Investigations Unit of Tortosa, a city to the south. Melchor’s superior officer is a proponent of Catalan independence; finding Melchor insufficiently devoted to his cause, he dubs him españolazo.

As Cercas unspools his protagonist’s progress in the Adell case, Melchor has plenty of opportunity to consider the example of Javert. As the book nears its final stages, an explanation slowly comes into focus–but not before further tragedy occurs. The novel concludes with a late-stage jolt which rather strains credulity, even as it drives home a point the author has made over the course of his writing career: The ghosts of Spain’s recent history are still with us.

Benjamin Shull is a writer and editor in Brooklyn.