It is a commonplace of paramilitary folklore that, once initiated in an armed and secret organisation, you can never leave it alive. The Basque separatist organisation ETA has executed this harsh law on several notorious occasions. However, many "Etarras" left the group unimpeded in the late 1970s and 1980s, availing of amnesties and deals offered by the Spanish government under a policy quaintly known as "social reinsertion".
If you can take the person out of the organisation, however, it may not be so easy to take the organisation out of the person. This is one of several politico-psychological conundrums which Bernado Atxaga, the Basque Country's most successful contemporary novelist, explores in this spare, absorbing and occasionally frustrating literary thriller. His protagonist, "the man known to everyone as Carlos" (but whom no one, or no one living, really knows at all), has recently left ETA. With some former comrades, Carlos is running a hotel in Catalonia, funded by a valedictory bank job. Rather more culpably, in his own eyes, he has committed his mildly barmy (but embarrassingly perceptive) brother to a mental home, and appropriated his funds as well.
Carlos spends much of his time in the isolated hotel bakery, kneading dough to an obsessively high standard. His head is filled with the voices of others, cajoling, mocking and observing his attempts to free himself from the past. There is Sabino, who trained him as a revolutionary; the wife of a kidnap victim he killed in cold blood; his brother, with his infuriatingly appropriate hippie platitudes; and the Rat, a kind of malignant conscience which undermines his attempts to construct a plausible new self without betraying the values of solidarity, commitment and sacrifice which had informed his entire life. There is a hidden basement below the bakery, which he has been using for occasional sexual liaisons. It is now occupied by Jone and Jon, two members of the hard-line faction of ETA, on the run after a shoot-out in Bilbao. Carlos was under no obligation to take them in, and finds their continued commitment to terrorism absurd. His motive, he speculates, may be as arbitrary as the fact that he had vaguely fancied Jone from the moment he saw her on a "wanted" poster.
His increasingly reclusive behaviour arouses the suspicions of his partners, and he in turn begins to suspect that one of them may be betraying him. The hotel is hosting the Polish football team during the 1982 World Cup, and he gradually realises that a group of sports journalists are probably anti-terrorist police. As their net tightens, Carlos draws up an elaborate, tragically flawed scheme to spring the Etarras from the trap and release himself from his commitments.
Atxaga writes in Basque, a marvellously idiosyncratic language with a weak literary tradition. He is one of a generation of writers and film-makers who emerged in the 1970s, and created a strong presence on the Basque and Spanish cultural scenes with a kind of magic realism. This book marks a new departure, which contrasts sharply with Atxaga's only other work published in English, Obabakoak. The profuse, intricate imagery of the latter is stripped back to the bare branches here. Atxaga's lush, imaginative undergrowth undoubtedly ran too wild in some of his intervening novels, but the pruning here sometimes seems jagged and clumsy. This may be partly due to the perils of double translation (through Spanish into English), which may also account for some lapses into leaden exposition.
However, as a psychological portrait of a reformed revolutionary at the end of his tether, this book flashes with steely insights. It is also endowed with a page-turning power that speeds up impressively in the closing chapters.
Paddy Woodworth is an Irish Times staff journalist, currently on leave writing a book on the 1980s `Dirty War' in the Basque Country
