'The Purity of Blood' and 'The Sun over Breda'

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

I'll take these two as one, as they follow each other. 'The Purity of Blood' opens with the beginings of a murder mystery (the blurb on the back of the book echoes this), but within a few pages it deviates from this promising beginning and become a somewhat boring account of the fate of Captain Altriste's companion, Inigo Balboa after he is captured by the Spanish Inquisition (whom no body expects) and tortured for various reasons.

The book is basically an unsatisfactory examination of what it meant to be Jewish in 17th century Spain. Unsatisfying since this examination comes at the expense of the eagerly anticipated mystery, the murder being solved along the way almost as an after thought. (One starts to understand why the film was so horribly edited).

'The Sun over Breda' take place once Alatriste and Balboa have fled Spain to fight in the Nederlands, and is a disjointed account of the Spanish army's gradual defeat told through the eyes of Inigo Balboa. Like 'The Purity of Blood', this novel appears to be coaching history in terms of our contemporary age and Pérez-Reverte seems to be drawing dubious parrallels between the Thirty Years War, the First World War and even Vietnam. I can't decide if he's taking the piss or if he's got a point. Sometimes it seems like he knows what he's talking about, but other times it reads as if he's just referencing things he saw as a war correspondent.

What ever else he is up to, the continued repetion and monotonous focus on Inigo Balboa is wearing me down, and to be frank, I can't be bothered to read the later books. The first book had a plot, a point and an interesting main character, but Captain Alatriste takes a back seat as Inigo Balboa (the narrator) grows older, and any notion of a plot evaporates as Pérez-Reverte/Balboa repeats himself again and again, ignoring any notion of story telling in favour of a long and dull account of Inigo Balboa's protracted love/hate relationship with the woman he loves.

Pérez-Reverte is something of an expert on Alexandre Dumas, so he likes to drop names and make connections between Dumas's work and his own. It can be amusing to spot these connections as they appear, but not amusing enough, alas. By the time I finished 'The Sun over Breda', I had lost all interest in the daring adventures of Captain Alatriste and his monomaniac side kick.