Ghosts of the Vietnam war

Fiction: Survival creates its own hell: guilt. Rodney Falk and his brother Bob both went to fight in Vietnam. Bob didn't come home. Rodney did and it ruined his life.

Spanish writer Javier Cercas looked to the madness of one war, the Spanish civil war, for his remarkable book Soldiers of Salamis, which was published in Spain in 2001. Its English translation followed two years later, and the novel, now available in more than 20 languages, has sold more than one million copies. His new novel, The Speed of Light, draws on another, equally insane conflict, the Vietnam war.

This is a such a good book, brilliantly sustained by a candid, conversational - at times rueful - tone and well translated by Anne McLean.

Cercas again enlists a narrator who is a writer, and is partly but not fully recognisable as himself. But the story is more personal; the narrator, through his friendship with the central character, Rodney, is more directly involved. And as the story unfolds, he must also reveal the details of his own life. Whereas Soldiers of Salamis was inspired by a chance discovery, through the course of writing an article about the survival of a man who was about to be executed but was only grazed by the bullet, and then was allowed to live by the militiaman who should have shot him but merely looked away, this new novel appears to take hold of the narrator almost by chance.

Early in the book the presence of the US writer Paul Auster announces itself and never lets go. Although there is no reference to Auster, Cercas certainly seems to have grasped the uncanny power of chance and coincidence.

His narrator discovers a remarkable story almost in spite of himself. "Now I lead a false life, an apocryphal, clandestine, invisible life, though truer than if it were real, but I was still me when I met Rodney Falk." It is an inspired opening sentence, and Cercas writes many more in the course of this tale, which demonstrates that life is far stranger than fiction.

It all begins in a flashback. The narrator looks back over 17 years to the young man he once was, intent on literary success before he ever wrote a word. His ambitions are shared by Marcos, his pal from back home. He wants to be a painter. One night, in true Auster fashion, the pair, then living in a dank Barcelona flat, meet up with the narrator's former literature professor, who encourages the narrator to take up a teaching-assistant scholarship in the Spanish department of a university in Illinois.

Off he goes, and there is an interesting sequence in which he recounts meeting up with fellow Spanish speakers, united only by language. Cercas has a light touch and an obvious sense of humour, as well as sufficient humility to present a vivid, less than flattering portrait of a younger self. He is also one of those writers who convinces the reader that every word is true.

Having secured our belief, the story itself is not only easy, but secondary to the larger issues he is drawn to - truth, guilt and human motivation.

So the young Spaniard meets Rodney Falk, who on hearing that he is Spanish, announces, "I've never been to Spain", and then asks, "Have you read Hemingway?" It proves a significant exchange, as the narrator, anxious to assert himself with this stranger, and aware that, as he recalls, "I'd barely read Hemingway, or I'd read him carelessly, and my notion of the American writer fitted into a pitiful snapshot of a washed-up, swaggering, alcoholic old man, friend to flamenco dancers and bull fighters, who spread a postcard of the most unbearable stereotypes of Spain through his outmoded works", and determined to appear cosmopolitan, says: "Frankly, I think he's shit." Instead of impressing his new acquaintance, Falk ignores him and returns to the book he had been reading.

Falk takes over the novel. His moody, bulky presence dominates, as does the mystery behind his oddness. But then it all begins to make sense. Falk, unlike more than 60,000 of his countrymen, returned from Vietnam and never gave up paying the price of having survived.

Cercas is careful not to idealise him. Falk is no innocent and knows he has been corrupted by going to a war of which he never wanted to be part. Nor does Cercas attempt to become an expert on Vietnam; but he does convey an understanding of its horrific legacy.

A literary friendship emerges between the narrator and Falk. Cercas has a flair for characterisation, and the dialogue - particularly the exchanges between these two - are well handled. But when the narrator returns after a short trip with some other friends, Rodney Falk has left the college. His abrupt departure leads the narrator to the Falk family home, where his father is not forthcoming. But later, Falk snr changes his mind and presents the narrator with the letters Bob and Rodney wrote home from Vietnam. The old man, in some of the most moving passages in the novel, begins to explain the reason Rodney has become a man no one now knows.

This is the way in which this intriguing, human novel proceeds - it demands the patience and insistence of life itself. Fate and chance continually intervene. The narrator returns to Spain and does become a writer. He marries and has a son. His friendship with Rodney is reduced to something that was part of his past. But then Rodney arrives in Spain. All the while, the more we learn about Rodney and his many sorrows, the more the narrator discovers about himself and his own self-deception.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Speed of Light By Javier Cercas, translated by Anne McLean Bloomsbury, 278pp. £14.99