Every Spanish schoolboy knows that the mind of the swashbuckling swordsman Captain Alatriste is as sharp as his blade.
Spain in the 17th century was a place where Madrileños had to live by their wits to survive the intrigues of the royal court and the infamous Inquisition.
For more than a decade after Alatriste burst on to the literary scene in the 1990s, the publication of each novel in the series by the bestselling author Arturo Pérez-Reverte was greeted with almost religious fervour. The books became part of school curriculums. Then, to the chagrin of his fans, the tales about the taciturn old soldier dried up.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte has bowed to pressure from his fans
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However, with a surprise as sudden as the flash of his hero’s sword, Pérez-Reverte has announced that a new novel will come out this summer to mark 30 years of Alatriste’s existence. “A lot of time has passed since the last one — 14 years — but the next one is due above all to readers badgering me to continue the series, pressuring me,” Pérez-Reverte, 73, said. “I wanted to do other things but even schools asked me, so finally I relented.”
Lauded internationally as a successor to Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle, Pérez-Reverte has sold more than 20 million copies of his Alatriste books in more than 40 languages. The adventures of Alatriste, of which more than four million copies have been sold in Spain, have also led to role-playing games, a cultural route through Madrid and even a restaurant in the capital, La Taberna del Capitán Alatriste.
The news of a new Alatriste novel has made national headlines. Pérez-Reverte is widely credited with reviving Spanish interest in the country’s 17th-century imperial Golden Age through the series, which was made into a film starring Viggo Mortensen in 2006.
The next book, the eighth in the series and titled Mission in Paris, places Alatriste and his inseparable companions in the thick of the action as Huguenots resist in La Rochelle under siege by Cardinal Richelieu’s troops. “It is a time when England and Spain were enemies and of course the Duke of Buckingham was involved in the action in France and so the English heavily feature in the novel,” he said.
Pérez-Reverte was inspired to create the series after noticing a lack of attention to the period in the school textbooks of his then-teenage daughter, Carlota. He commissioned her to gather information and he developed the stories.
It is not the sword that makes a man a knight, Alatriste says, but the code of honour that he lives by
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Meticulous in their historical detail, his novels, based on enigmas and puzzles revolving around his fascination with fencing, poetry, culture and history, have won him the epithet “the Spanish Umberto Eco” and membership of his country’s Royal Academy.
“Creating a series of novels that owed as much to the history books and relationships of the time as to the adventure novels I loved in my childhood — Dumas, Féval, Sabatini, Salgari and so many others — was a challenge and a lot of fun,” he said.
A “politically incorrect” hero, as the author defines him, and “deeply human”, Alatriste is a mercenary and soldier who follows his own code of conduct. Deploying cape, sword and dagger to deadly effect, he is swept up in the period’s disastrous wars and the schemes of dastardly femmes fatales and figures such as the Count-Duke Olivares.
The novels weave together fictional and historical figures, such as Olivares and Alatriste’s companion-in-arms and fellow carouser Francisco Quevedo, the disreputable brawler and brilliant poet.
Alatriste is deeply human and politically incorrect, says his creator
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The moustache-chewing Alatriste skewers Spain’s inept kings and corrupt courtiers as “whoresons” and “vipers” as the series takes readers through the travails of the period, from colonial outposts in Oran to the bloody battlefields of Flanders.
In particular, his treatment of the tercios, the infantry units feared throughout Europe when Spain was the world’s most powerful nation, has won him praise among Spanish historians. In one of the novels, Pérez-Reverte claims a fictional place for Alatriste among the pikes of the tercios depicted in Velázquez’s famed The Surrender of Breda.
“There are two historical narratives, one that Spain was a marvellous imperial glory and the other that Spain was the sinister country of the Inquisition,” Pérez-Reverte said. “But Spain was both, light and darkness, glory and misery. What Alatriste tries to do is to look at the history of Spain objectively.”
He does it with panache. His mission is to “describe that fascinating and dangerous Spain of the 17th century, of narrow and poorly lit streets, taverns, brothels and gambling dens … an arrogant and proud world where life had to be earned between the gleam of two blades.”