Javier Marías’s Voyage Along the Horizon is another one of the Russian nesting doll novels I like so much. An unnamed first-person narrator has a party and overhears a Miss Bunnage and a Mr. Branshaw (neither of whom he knows) discussing the author Victor Arledge. It turns out Branshaw has a friend who once wrote a novel about Arledge, as yet unpublished, which Miss Bunnage would like very much to read. So Branshaw invites her and the narrator over the next day to listen to him read it.
The novel Branshaw reads is Voyage Along the Horizon, the story of a voyage undertaken by a group of European and American writers, artists, and musicians to Antarctica sometime in the early 20th century. Arledge, an English writer living in Paris, is encouraged by his American friend Captain Kerrigan to go on the trip.
Many of Arledge’s acquaintance, including his friends the Handls, are also on the ship, the steel-hulled sailing vessel Tallahassee. Before leaving, Arledge got a very interesting story from the Handls, whose letter is reproduced in the inner-Voyage Along the Horizon. It’s the story of Hugh Everett Bayham, an English concert pianist who is mysteriously kidnapped from London and taken to a private home in Scotland for four days. Arledge becomes obsessed with the story, and must know the details. Bayham, of course, is also on the Tallahassee, and Arledge fairly humiliates himself trying to get the secret out of him.
The bit about the secret is almost a little too frustrating for the reader, I think. Arledge spends his entire time on board ship quietly planning some way to find out what happened to Bayham, a man he doesn’t know at all and who clearly does not want to discuss the matter. And Arledge’s strategizing is pathetic, leaving him looking desperate and just bizarre. He even, attempting to draw out Bayham, ends up in a duel with another party, a French writer he despises. The fact that he ends up killing the Frenchman quite in cold blood as some kind of footnote to his curiosity kind of turns people off, too.
But then, surprisingly, Arledge does find out what’s happened. We don’t; the man overhearing that part of the story walked away just at the important moment. The narrator of the inner-Voyage is confident that Arledge was disappointed with the truth, and the next morning he acts like none of it ever happened. The whole thing had a funny effect on me. I despaired of ever knowing Bayham’s secret before Arledge did, to the point where I was just as over it as he was even though I didn’t get to hear about it.
Oh, and outside the nesting doll structure, the very first piece of the novel turns out to be a first-person fragment from Victor Arledge himself (the “real” Victor Arledge, or the Victor Arledge in the inner-Voyage?), musing on his foolishness on board the Tallahasee.
You see, I am a man who tends to be acquiescent and easy to please, and when people like myself abandon an endeavor or illusion we usually have little trouble finding the right arguments to convince us that our plans were in fact quite insipid; these arguments, in turn, allow us to actually feel thrilled and relieved when our endeavor goes awry. And so, the following morning, everything—or at least nearly everything—had already been forgotten.
(He’s clearly insane. Acquiescent and easy to please?)
After the voyage along the horizon, Arledge was pretty much ruined. We’re not quite sure why or how, but that trip was basically the end of him, and it seems the kidnapping business, or the duel, or just the whole terrible sour atmosphere of the voyage, must be at the root of it.
Did I mention the sour atmosphere of the voyage? Tomorrow: how Voyage Along the Horizon (the inside one, at least) illustrates Margaret Cohen’s chronotope of the ship (and turns it on its head).