All Souls: Oxford, adultery and the quiet ghosts of male loneliness

The majority of novels set in and around universities tend to concern themselves with the lives of students. Even the ones where the faculty are the protagonists tend to include members of the student body, usually as objects of desire and infatuation.

What sets Javier Marías’ novel, All Souls (translated into English from the original Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa), apart is the fact that students barely make an appearance in the story. Maybe that’s because his unnamed narrator, a Spanish translator, is reflecting on his two-year-long lecturing gig at Oxford some time previously as a period when he barely did any work: “…my duties in the city of Oxford were minimal, a fact that often made me feel I was playing a purely decorative role here.”

Realising he’d have to put in a little more effort, he dons his black robe and gets to class, where the students treat him “with an excessive degree of respect and an even greater degree of indifference.” The texts he teaches are chosen by his English colleagues and are of an obscure vernacular with which he’s unfamiliar. He naturally, when put on the spot by enquiring students about the roots of certain words, invents “wild etymologies on the spot” that are taken as gospel by both students and the Oxford dons. So the narrator is a bit of an unscrupulous and not particularly dedicated teacher. When he’s not (barely) teaching, he roams around Oxford, attends high table dinners, embarks on an affair with another member of the faculty, and spies on his colleagues. It turns out that “Adultery is hard work” — especially in a place where most dons have a reputation for being dreadful gossips. While our narrator tries to conceal the relationship as best he can, his lover Clare Bayes doesn’t have the same kind of scruples and is barely bothered.

It is at a hilariously chaotic high table supper that he first meets Clare — he’s trying to escape an obese young economist named Halliwell who’s trapped him in a conversation about the unique 18th-century cider tax that existed in England. Stressed out by the social conventions that prevent him from escaping the clutches of Halliwell or “fulminating against him (in Spanish)”, our distressed narrator chooses to make direct eye contact with Clare, and the first seeds of their relationship are planted.

Their doomed love might be central to the novel, and it does seem like every other extramarital affair that lasts till its expiry date. Still, Marías’ real subject here is male loneliness, and what makes All Souls exceptional in this regard is the author’s gift for observation.

I don’t think I have read as poignant a passage about how one’s garbage reflects one’s life anywhere else: “When you’re alone, when you live alone and live, moreover, in a foreign country, you take more notice than usual of the rubbish bin, because at times it may be the only thing with which you maintain a constant, no, more than that, an ongoing relationship.”

The narrator’s friendship with two other colleagues is also threaded through All Souls — men given over to the life of academe, but with deeply messy personal lives. There’s an authenticity to this story that could only be told by someone who’s lived the experience — Marías himself was a visiting lecturer at Oxford in the early 80s. The original Spanish version came out in 1989. All Souls is not an easy read, not least because the story itself loops back and forth in time, and the long sentences demand your close attention to what Marías is revealing about his cast of characters.

Those characters are the souls of the title, the ghosts who haunt the narrator now that he’s left behind Oxford and his friends there. A cosy campus novel this is not — and though humour occasionally bubbles to the surface, All Souls reveals in its final pages what it’s actually been all along: a ghost story. Not a conventional one — it’s the kind of ghost story that is less about the horror of the dead and more about the refusal of memories to lie still.

That One Book is a monthly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at  saudha.substack.com