It Happened in Lisbon

Like a Fading Shadow a novel by Antonio Munoz Molina.  Picador.  312 pp.  ****1/2

In 2013, Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz Molina traveled to Lisbon to help his son—who was living there as a freelancer—celebrate his 26^th birthday.  That marked a return to the city for Munoz Molina; he had gone there in 1987, when his son was one month old, because he was writing a novel that was partly set in the city, where he’d never been, and he wanted to get the locations right.  He was at the time a 31-year-old novelist, just finding his voice, and somewhat unsettled in his marriage.  As it turned out, the book he wrote, Winter in Lisbon, was his first great success, enabled him to quit his day job, and was eventually made into a movie.

While he was in Lisbon visiting his son, he found a shop that sold handmade notebooks, and bought one with the idea of starting a new project.  He loved the feeling of writing in a new notebook with a fresh pencil.  His son asked if he had a project in mind, and though Munoz Molina sometimes responded to such questions and sometimes didn’t, in the belief that responding might jinx the project, he said the one thing on his mind was a fact he’d read years before, that James Earl Ray had spent ten days in Lisbon in 1968, fleeing the authorities after he’d murdered Martin Luther King.  That fact intrigued him, and apparently his son’s question generated this novel, which is unlike any other I’ve ever read.

For one thing, it hardly seems like a novel.  Munoz Molina seems very much to be writing about his own life, and he became utterly obsessed with James Earl Ray, and the weird and colossal blunder he made by traveling to Lisbon.  Inasmuch as this is a novel at all, it becomes one when he speculates on various aspects of Ray’s life, and his motivations.  But the book moves through these three moments in time, all of them in Lisbon: James Earl Ray in 1968, the young Munoz Molina in 1987, and the older successful novelist in 2013, no longer married to the woman with whom he had fathered his son, renowned and sought out by fans and other writers.

I was fascinated initially by the story of James Earl Ray, about whom I knew almost nothing.[1]  He was born to a dirt-poor family, a father who often didn’t work and sat around drinking, a mother who apparently drank with him and gave birth to a child just about every year.  The children were neglected, cold and hungry and lice-ridden, sometimes sleeping on the bare floor; it’s hard to believe they even survived to adulthood.

James Earl became a petty criminal and as an adult had been in prison several times; in fact he’d escaped prison about a year before he murdered King, and should have been in prison when he committed the crime.  The book is slightly vague on his motivation; as far as we can tell, he was just impelled by the racist sentiments of his bigoted father, who seemed to hate every ethnic group but his own, but especially hated blacks.  James Earl hated King precisely because he was trying to free black people, also perhaps because he was more educated and distinguished than Ray himself.

It’s astonishing and heartbreaking to read how matter of fact the crime was, as Ray bought the high-powered rifle he would use (he had been in the military and was trained as a sharpshooter), rented a room in the rooming house alongside the Lorraine Motel where King was staying, then sat there with the rifle until the man came out on his porch, and on the second occasion when he came out, shot him.  This earthshaking crime was banal it its simplicity.

According to Munoz Molina, who researched it extensively, policemen walked right by Ray as he fled the rooming house.  He dropped the rifle, which was wrapped in a blanket, in a doorway.  He fled Memphis, went to Canada and to England, then went to Lisbon because he heard somewhere that many ships left that port for Africa, and he believed that if he could get to a white-supremacist country like Rhodesia, he would be celebrated for his crime.  It somehow didn’t occur to him that in Lisbon he would be in a totally foreign city where people spoke a language that was gibberish to him, that it would be difficult for him to live day by day, much less find a ship to Africa.  He couldn’t even rob a jewelry shop, because he didn’t have anywhere to fence the jewels.

It is astonishing how much Ray spent his adult life hiding out, obsessively reading newspapers, eating junk food because it was cheap, living in crummy places.  In some ways, his life improved after he was incarcerated for killing King.  He let a weirdly uneventful and pointless life except for that one act.  It’s somehow infuriating and horrifying that such a nonentity could commit such a crime.

Munoz Molina alternates chapters on Ray with chapters about his own early life, and his struggles to write the novel partly set in Lisbon.  So adept was he at describing his struggles that I was shocked to read that the book was an eventual success, its coming together had seemed so haphazard.  But the Munoz Molina who writes Like a Fading Shadow is an expert writer; his powers of observation and description are remarkable.  It’s a pleasure to read this book even when it describes the most ordinary day to day events.

Toward the end, however, Munoz Molina extends himself, using his imaginative powers to describe not only Ray’s state of mind before and after the assassination, but also the final days of Martin Luther King.  The portrait of King, who has of course been sanctified and idealized after his death, is startling; he describes a man who became an activist almost accidentally, would have preferred life as a professorial theologian, and who was weary of a struggle where he had to give the same speeches over and over and where his days were dogged by hardship, physical fear, and a feeling of resignation which made him—at least according to this author[2]—almost ready to die.  He roused himself on the night before his death with a speech that seemed to come out of nowhere, inspired by the Holy Spirit, almost as if King foresaw his approaching death.  He wouldn’t even have heard the shot that killed him.  He died instantly.

After his incarceration, James Earl Ray spent a great deal of his time obsessively writing.  He had confessed to his crime in order to avoid the death penalty, later tried to recant his confession and get a new trial, but was never able to.  He created an elaborate story about how he was used by another man to look like King’s assassin, while the other man actually did the deed (though there is no question that Ray purchased the rifle, and his prints were on it).  While in prison he received letters from all over the world asking for his autograph.  He died of a diseased liver at the age of 69, waiting in vain for a transplant.

This is a strange, and strangely marvelous book.  It’s a portrait of a crime, of a young writer, and of an older writer, all in one.  The unifying factor is the city of Lisbon, about which I knew almost nothing.  But I’m not alone.  Munoz Molina knew nothing about it when he decided to set his early novel there, and James Earl Ray knew very little when he arrived there on the lam.

I would never have picked this book up except for my brother’s fervent recommendation.  He doesn’t read many contemporary novels, but read this one.

[1] In 1968 I was a sophomore in college, and joined in with the protests that followed Martin Luther King’s death, also obsessively followed the Presidential campaigns that were going on that year, involving Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy.  But James Earl Ray slipped from my radar altogether; I didn’t realize he hadn’t been captured immediately, and that he had somehow escaped Memphis after the assassination.

[2] Munoz Molina cites Taylor Branch’s multi-volume biography of King as a source.  He seems to be a tireless researcher for this whole project.