ACCORDING to the ancient Greek philosopher Gorgias, poetry ‘is a deception, wherein he who deceives is more honest that he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived.’ These days, a common complaint about novels is that they are not ‘believable’ or ‘realistic’. Often what we mean is that the author has not done a good job of deceiving us. In this sophisticated book on Enric Marco, who for three decades pretended to be a survivor of Flossenburg concentration camp during WW2 and a clandestine anti-Francoist revolutionary, novelist Javier Cercas wonders if he is best qualified to tell this charlatan’s true story. After all, Cercas has spent his whole career deceiving people.

The thought is planted by the writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who, shortly after Marco’s cover was blown, welcomed him (ironically) into the ‘guild of story-tellers’ and hailed him as a ‘monstrous genius.’ It is Vargas Llosa who encouraged Cercas to write this extraordinary book. Presented as a novel, it is actually a rigorous study of Marco’s life, the art of lying, the nature of conformity, and how our reality is coloured with fictions. Most of us muddle along in our daily lives indulging innocent delusions about who we are. Marco went one step further. He acted out his madness, and became the ‘hero’ we all, secretly, dream of being.

In April 2005, Marco was president of the Amical de Mauthausen, ‘the principle Spanish association for the survivors of Mauthausen, one of the Nazi concentration camps.’ The final preparations were underway for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, which was due to take place in May. But, a few days before the event, Benito Bermejo, a historian, published documents proving that Marco had not been arrested by the Gestapo in France and was not a survivor of the Nazi camps, as he had claimed. The revelation cast doubt on Marco’s life-story. What is worse is that Marco had spent years touring schools and giving talks on his traumatic and heroic experiences.

With forensic precision, Cercas plucks the truth from the lies in Marco’s life. He compiles hours of testimony from Marco himself, and talks to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the man. What remains is the story of a ‘mediocre’ car mechanic living a quiet life who rises to international renown simply through his astonishing charm and ability to spin a yarn. Like Don Quixote, Marco gives his life an ‘epic lustre’. Unlike the most famous madman of Spanish literature, who only managed to fool himself, Marco succeeds in fooling almost everyone.

Rather than simply setting the historical record straight, however, Cercas puts his analytical mind to work, trying to fathom the exact nature of Marco’s narcissism. He tells us his book is a ‘novel without fiction,’ drawing on the tradition of the non-fiction novel. However, The Impostor lacks the formative qualities and imaginative engagement that novels require, perhaps because Cercas needs, out of necessity, to work so hard to establish the truth. It is a book that cannot be placed neatly in a category, and is all the better for it. The structure is intricate and recursive, mirroring one of Cercas’s main arguments about the circular nature of the past. Like Faulkner, he knows the past is never dead.

Cercas opens up deep philosophical questions about the nature of truth and lies. For instance, is there such a thing as a good liar? One of Marco’s defences is that he lied ‘not out of egotism, but generosity, not out of vanity, but altruism, to educate younger generations about the horrors, to unearth historical memory for this amnesiac country…’ Although lying is essential to some parts of life - like novel writing - Cercus comes down on the side of Montaigne, who thought lying an ‘“accursed vice” which is ‘a violation of the first rule of human coexistence.’

At the end of this percipient character study, Cercas convinces Marco to finally own up to a long string of falsehoods. Then, before Marco can launch into another self-aggrandising monologue, Cercas turns the screw with a few more. It is too much. Marco cannot take any more truth. He puts his head in his hands and pleads with his interrogator: “‘please, leave me something.’” Marco’s life is the stuff of fiction. But, without his deceptions, he is nothing. It was a shame he did not try to deceive the world within the pages of a novel. Then he might have achieved true greatness.