The story, told through the eyes of a young girl and her mother, moves backward in time from Quebec to France to Algeria to Buenos Airies and then back to the present in Quebec. It is a brilliant exploration of something that clearly troubles Manguel: how can we reconcile the images of, and the feelings we have for, certain people whom on the one hand we respect and love, but on the other we discover that they are monsters. Marianne, the mother, is a fine character, well drawn from her childhood in Algiers into her adulthood when she meets, falls in love with, and marries, the Captain in the French army. He is sensitive, compassionate, understanding, supportive, and cultured. His position in the army takes him away for long and frequent periods, but the reunion is always a happy one; in fact, the only twinge is when the Captain is stationed in the city for a length of time and Marianne finds that the absence and prospect of reunion is perhaps more fulfilling than the day-to-day living. But this is a passing moment, and they live well together, even surviving the miscarriage of their first child.

It is never explained what the Captain does in the army, though there are hints in the narrative. The destruction of Marianne's world comes when she goes to find him at the office one day, in BA, to ask for his help in trying to find the daughter of a friend taken off the streets by the roving police or military squads, and she accidentally stumbles upon him giving an extended lecture on the philosophy and practice of torture. He does not see her, but from that day on she almost becomes mute and she progressively lets herself go physically so that she balloons into an enormous person. But still she accompanies the Captain to Quebec, where he takes his retirement, and is the target of vengeance squads from Argentina. Her almost unimaginable crisis is well described when the Captain comes home that first evening, not knowing that Marianne now knows of his "profession", and as he lays beside her, she thinks:

I can't love Him....This is Another; this is not Him; this can not be Him...I love Him still; I can't understand how, but I love Him still.

Echoes here of a real-life experience that Manguel had in Argentina, and which he describes in Into the Looking-Glass Wood, when he had a professor in university whom he revered for introducing him to an awareness and love of literature, but whom he discovered, years later, had been an informant to the regime on students. This shattering revelation led Manguel to think of three options:

I can decide that the person who was of the uttermost importance in my life, who in a way allowed me to be who I am now, who was the very essence of the illuminating and inspiring teacher, was in fact a monster and that everything he taught me, everything he had encouraged me to love, was corrupt.

I can try to justify his unjustifiable actions and ignore the fact that they led to the torture and death of my friends.

I can accept that Rivadavia was both a good teacher and the collaborator of torturers, and allow that description to stand, like water and fire.

I don't know which of these option is the right one.

Nor did Marianne; instead she lived with the water and fire, and in the end welcomed the fire that was the bomb that she knew the vengeance squad had planted to kill both her and the Captain in bed, not because she had done wrong, but because it was the best way to be sure of getting the Captain, which in fact they did not, killing only Marianne.

There is then a brilliant piece of writing with the Captain fleeing in a car with his daughter Ana to whom he recounts the history of his life and how he became an instructor in torture, he who as a child, and even as an adult, would be physically ill in witnessing blood and the death of an animal. There is a powerful ending to the novel, but one that has such a strong ring to it for both the Captain and Ana, when at the end of his long monologue, the Captain asks if Ana, knowing all this will accompany him. She says no, and so the Captain stops the car, in the middle of nowhere in the rain, and lets her out:

Then, with a soft whir as the wheels spun in the mud, the car drove off westwards in the dark. Ana had no idea where she was. She felt cold, and wet. She looked ahead, towards the disappearing tail-lights, and stared walking away in the invisible rain.

The description of the Captain's lecture on the techniques and philosophy of torture is chilling and brilliant for its emphasis on the idea that it is not the torturer who causes the pain and even death of the victim; he, the torturer, is but an instrument; it is the victim who is ultimately responsible for not giving the information required and thus forcing the torturer to continue: the ultimate obscenity: the victim is responsible for his/her own demise. It is this sort of compartmentalization and complete eradication of any sense of sympathy or empathy for the victims that allow someone like the Captain to live his double life.

There is another theme in this book that Manguel expands upon at some length in Into the Glass Wood: the power and at the same time the limitations of words and descriptions. As the Captain says at one point:

We require definitions. Without them there is no understanding and no achievement. To define is to pare down, to mutilate, to censure, but we are hypocrites if we pretend that we can be anything at all without definitions.

I think this is such a good novel because it explores some of the very deepest contradictions that can happen in human nature, and points out that just as there are no simple people, nor are there necessarily simple solutions. Though I think Ana's brave act of renunciation is the most apt and most correct response. The value of a novels such as this, is I think aptly described in the following which I read recently from Richard Ford on Chekhov and the value of literature:

To us, such fresh aptness confirms not only the continuity and saving vitality of the literary impulse, but it also assures us that we ourselves are part of a continuum and are sustainable. How we feel today about a dying wife, our married lover, our unsuitable suitor, our loyalties to our forsaken family, about the overmastering way in which life is too dense with subjectivity and too poor in objectifiable truth, all this was exactly how Russians felt far away in time, and when, just as now, a story was judged to be a saving response. Chekhov makes us feel corroborated, indemnified inside our human frailty, even smally hopeful of our ability to cope, to order, and find clarity. (emphasis added)

With Chekhov, we share the frankness of life's inalienable thereness; we share the conviction of how much we would profit if more of human sensation could be elevated into clear, expressive language; we share a view that life (particularly life with others) is a surface beneath which we must strive to construct a convincing subtext in order that more can be clung to less desperately; and we share a hopeful intuition that more of ourselves--especially those parts we feel only we know about--can be made susceptible to clear, useful exposition.