Swashbuckling tale blends fun and sadness
Purity of Blood
By Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Putnam, 288 pp., $23.95
Madrid, 1623. Sword-for-hire Diego Alatriste has been offered a job by one Vicente de la Cruz. De la Cruz's daughter is a novice at a nearby convent, where, he has learned, the novices and nuns are the chaplain's personal harem. De la Cruz wants Alatriste to rescue his daughter.
If all goes smoothly, Captain Alatriste will earn a lot of money in a couple of hours. If not, potential complications abound. Let's set aside the fact that breaking into a convent is a serious crime in 17th-century Spain. The lecherous chaplain of the convent, Juan Coroado, is a favorite of the Conde de Olivares, the king's chief minister. Furthermore, the members of the de la Cruz family are not, as Spaniards said at the time, ''Old Christians." Vicente's great-grandfather was a Jewish convert. And working for Jews can attract the unfriendly interest of the Inquisition.
Of course, nothing goes smoothly, and that's where the excitement begins. Our guide to the proceedings is Iñigo Balboa, the son of a dead army friend of Alatriste's and now the captain's sidekick and ward. Iñigo ameliorates one of the frequent problems of historical novels: how to explain the customs of an alien time and place without getting too awkward or obvious. He's recalling the events of ''Purity of Blood" decades later, when he's a tired old soldier. But at the time the novel takes place he's 13 and new to Madrid. The older Balboa is able to remember how fascinating everything about life in the Spanish capital, and everything about adult life, was to him then. He explains the ways of Hapsburg Madrid with an ease that comes with remembering what it was like to have just learned them himself.
Nevertheless, author Arturo Pérez-Reverte doesn't entirely avoid the pedantry that is a frequent danger of historical novels. Sometimes the voice of the older Iñigo breaks in, dwelling a little too much on the disasters that befell Spain during his lifetime. But sometimes you just have to let old soldiers ramble on.
Many historical novels are fluff: costume potboilers like ''The Dante Club." Some manage to be serious fiction that conveys something of the reality of life in another time and place, like Paul Scott's ''The Jewel in the Crown." ''Purity of Blood" is somewhere in between: It's vastly superior to the majority of what passes for historical fiction but doesn't approach the heights of the genre. It's great fun in the tradition of historical swashbucklers such as ''Three Musketeers" or ''The Scarlet Pimpernel," and yet it's not all sword fights and breakneck horseback rides. There's a sadness that gives the novel some depth: the sadness of Diego Alatriste. He spent his youth doing all the right things: He was brave, he served his king, and he was loyal to his comrades in arms. All he has to show for it is a rented room, a lot of old scars, and a line of work likely to kill him.
Pérez-Reverte made his name in the '90s with international bestsellers such as ''The Flanders Panel" (a hyperliterate murder mystery about art history and chess) and ''The Club Dumas" (a supernatural thriller about the antiquarian book trade). His detour into historical fiction became available to American readers last year with ''Captain Alatriste," which introduces Diego and Iñigo.
I should be grateful that G.P. Putnam's Sons has announced that we can look forward to a Captain Alatriste novel annually for the next three years. But I'm a little annoyed: I want to read them all now.
