'Captain Alatriste'

CAPTAIN ALATRISTE

By Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Translated from the Spanish

By Margaret Sayers Peden

Putnam. 253 pp. $23.95

When people began to live in cities, the harsh rural world of the peasant, shepherd and farmer began to look bucolic and cozy, a golden age, a lost paradise. After the rise of motorized vehicles, the horse metamorphosed from a draft animal into the trophy pet of millionaires and the sleekly sexy protagonist of sentimental novels for young girls ( Misty of Chincoteague , Black Beauty , National Vel vet ). And so it was natural that soon after armies began shooting at each other with rifles and cannon, the sword no longer appeared a sickening instrument of gruesome death and disfigurement but rather a noble weapon of elegance, finesse and high romance.

From the 19th century on, readers searching for adventure have always loved tales of flashing steel, of duels to the death on moonlit parapets, of swashbucklers with ironic smiles and perfect manners. Let us sound the roll call: D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, the Count of Monte Cristo, Ivanhoe, Brigadier Gerard, Scaramouche, Captain Blood, the Scarlet Pimpernel. Yet this honor guard still leaves out the lionhearts of sword and sorcery -- Peter Pan, Conan the Cimmerian, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, the dauntless members of the Fellowship of the Ring. As for the historical novel, one need only recall such never-quite-forgotten bestsellers as Samuel Shellabarger's Prince of Foxes and Thomas B. Costain's The Black Rose.

To this sharp-edged company, Arturo Pérez-Reverte now adds Captain Alatriste . Or at least he would like to. This novel by the acclaimed author of The Club Dumas , The Queen of the South and other "intellectual" thrillers was apparently Pérez-Reverte's first bestseller in Spain, and the first volume in a five-book series. They have all been wildly popular. Putnam doesn't indicate this, but my guess is that Captain Alatriste appeared initially as a magazine or newspaper serial. With slight or subtle variation, each of its chapters opens by recapitulating some of the back-story, reintroducing the various characters and proffering a relatively self-contained episode. Throughout, the pace is leisurely, packed (or padded) with historical information and examples of Golden Age poetry. Many celebrated figures of 17th-century Spanish history appear: the political mastermind el Conde de Olivares, the poet Francisco de Quevedo, the painter Velázquez. The narrator, Iñigo Balboa -- now an old man, but then a boy of 13 or 14 -- often forecasts future events, even resorting to variants on the hoary formula familiar to mystery fans as HIBK -- "Had I but known. . . ." Indeed, much of the book might be viewed as a calculated assemblage of post-Alexandre Dumas clichés, its dramatis personae including such stock characters as the whore with a heart of gold, the drunken, combative poet and the kindly old priest.

Harsh though these observations may be, the novel is still enjoyable if one doesn't expect too much from it. Think of Captain Alatriste as a television show, something like the old "Zorro." It's pitched on about that level of originality and sophistication.

Diego Alatriste y Tenorio is a former soldier, wounded many times, now approaching 40, and currently forced to make his living as a bravo for hire. He has threatened, even killed, for money. Nonetheless, he is fundamentally decent, a man of honor, with a "peculiar sense of harsh, unchanging, despairing humor." His "page" -- the son of a former comrade, now dead -- admires him immensely and tells the story. It takes place in the 1620s, and Iñigo Balboa introduces the tale with suitable panache:

"It is the adventure of masked men and two Englishmen, which caused not a little talk at court, and in which the captain not only came close to losing the patched-up hide he had managed to save in Flanders, and in battling Turkish and Barbary corsairs, but also made himself a pair of enemies who would harass him for the rest of his life. I am referring to the secretary of our lord and king, Luis de Alquézar, and to his sinister Italian assassin, the silent and dangerous swordsman named Gualterio Malatesta, a man so accustomed to killing his victims from behind that when by chance he faced them, he sank into deep depressions, imagining that he was losing his touch. It was also the year in which I fell in love like a bawling calf, then and forever, with Angélica de Alquézar, who was as perverse and wicked as only Evil in the form of a blonde eleven- or twelve-year-old girl can be. But we will tell everything in its time."

But I won't, lest I spoil the reader's pleasure. The basic plot, though, is relatively simple: Captain Alatriste and another swordsman go to a midnight meeting in a deserted house, where they are given a commission by two masked men to frighten a pair of visiting English strangers, perhaps even wounding one, but nothing more. After the more senior of the two masked men leaves, a third figure suddenly glides in from behind a secret panel. He proudly wears no disguise and announces in a "disagreeable" voice: "I . . . am Fray Emilio Bocanegra, president of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition." Unexpectedly, he changes the plan for the travelers known as Thomas and John Smith: "Kill them outright," he orders.

Any reader can guess that nothing will go quite as intended during that dark ambush in the lonely lane near the House of the Seven Chimneys. Before the adventure is over, Alatriste will be a hunted man, Iñigo will come to his rescue at the Gate of Lost Souls, there will be assassination plots during a performance of a Lope de Vega play, and a murderous scheme of global proportions, reaching from the Spanish court to the English royal family, will be revealed. But, as we know from the beginning, Alatriste will survive; all will be well. For there are four more adventures to follow; the second, Purity of Blood , is due out next year.

Truth be told, I suspect that teenagers will be the best audience for Captain Alatriste. At times I even wondered if it might not have been conceived as a young adult novel. Though primarily a sword and cape adventure, it is also distinctly educational, pointing out the glories and excesses of the Siglo d'Oro, elegizing a past that has vanished:

"All of them -- he [Lope de Vega], don Francisco de Quevedo, Velázquez, Captain Alatriste, the miserable and magnificent epoch I knew -- are all gone now. But in libraries, in books, on canvases, in churches, in palaces, streets, and plazas, those men left an indelible mark that lives on. The memory of Lope's hand will disappear with me when I die, as will Velázquez's Andalusian accent, the sound of don Francisco's golden spurs jingling as he limped along, the serene gray-green gaze of Captain Alatriste. Yet the echoes of their singular lives will resound as long as that many-faceted country, that mix of towns, tongues, histories, bloods, and betrayed dreams exists: that marvelous and tragic stage we call Spain."

Sigh. As a critic I read Captain Alatriste recognizing its weaknesses, and yet I suspect that I'll be back to find out more about the actress María de Castro who, says Iñigo, "was later to fill a certain space in the lives of Captain Alatriste and me," to discover just how evil the palely beautiful Angélica really is, and to watch, from a position of safety, of course, the next encounter of the captain with Gualterio Malatesta, the implacably efficient assassin known only by his sinister, almost noiseless, whistling of " ti-ri-tu, ta-ta ." ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. at washingtonpost.com.