The Negotiator (152 pages) is a work of fiction, but is based on the longest kidnapping in the history of the Basque separatist group ETA, that of prison officer José Antonio Ortega Lara, who was held in captivity for 532 days between 1996 and 1997. The novel draws on the account of the professional negotiator who took part in meetings with the separatist group in Algiers and is told from four different perspectives.

The first perspective is that of the negotiator himself. He is in Algiers, negotiating with the kidnappers, whose demands habitually include the relocation of prisoners and open prison regime. He takes the whole process very calmly – words are for them, he hopes that time is for him. The idea is not to secure the victim’s freedom, but to make sure they don’t kill him. It is 529 days since the kidnapping, and 292 days since he was hired for the job of talking to the kidnappers and reaching an agreement. In the background, there is an armed conflict in Algeria, with Islamists wanting to gain control of the government and armed troops in the streets. The only time he manages to relax is in the evening, during conversations with his partner, who is ill. He describes the city to her, basing himself on Camus’ descriptions, and tells her about the people who have stayed in the hotel, people like Édith Piaf and María Casares. He knows they are skirting around the issue of her illness, but she encouraged him to take the job.

The negotiator is under pressure from the Spanish government, and in particular the Special Central Unit of the Civil Guard, to play for time. There has been an arrest in France, and they are getting closer to finding out where the victim is being held. The separatist group’s spokesperson is older, he is the one responsible for the group’s ideological foundations; the other two representatives are younger, a man and a woman he imagines might be occasional lovers. He talks to his partner again – she has been to leave apples on her mother’s grave. In the hotel, he thinks he can hear something, even though the hotel is meant to be empty – an employee and their partner making love in the hammam.

The spokesperson is growing impatient. They are threatening to kill the man if no progress is made towards prisoner relocation, release of sick prisoners, better conditions for family visits. The negotiator reflects on the beginning of the process and the people he met: a journalist who arranged the first meeting with the separatist group; a Jesuit archivist who showed him cells in the monastery where young men fighting against the regime had taken refuge and businessmen who had been unwilling to pay revolutionary taxes had been detained; various politicians. The first meeting was in a motel – this is where the ground rules were laid down, trying to find common ground, like when you want to buy an apartment and have to agree on a price. It comes to the last day of the negotiations in Algiers. The kidnappers say they are going to kill him. The negotiator explains the advances they have made and urges them to call their contacts. They claim to do so, but there is a power outage. When the power comes back on, the negotiator receives a call telling him to go straight to the airport. They have found the zulo, the place where the victim has been kept, but the only person there is a businessman whose family have paid the ransom, not the man he was negotiating for.

The second perspective is that of a software developer in London who was once a member of ETA. Now his software helps cause markets to crash, so the company he works for can evict homeowners and buy up their properties. He has arranged to meet a woman outside St Paul’s Cathedral, but is surprised when she turns up wearing a veil. She has just been to visit her parents in Marrakesh, where a marriage has been arranged for her. Not only is she wearing a veil, but her fingers have been hennaed. They spend some time together, get into an altercation with some hooligans in Chelsea, she writes something in Arabic for him on a tissue, and they take their leave. His apartment overlooks the stage door of some theatres in Soho, where the bins are. He wonders whether some of the homeless he sees are there because of him. The apartment belongs to one of his bosses, who bought it on the cheap. He misses the company of the people he used to live with in a Victorian house on the Cromwell Road. One night, he finds the Moroccan woman waiting for him outside his apartment, and they make love rather violently. He receives a call from a bookseller in his hometown. His company has taken possession of the building, but he cannot bring himself to answer. This is where he spent time as a youth, joining the cause for independence, attending meetings, and reading books. He decides to relocate to Mexico, but is kidnapped on his arrival and taken outside the capital. He is allowed to call his new employers and asks them to contact the negotiator he met when acting on behalf of ETA at the initial meeting in the motel. He is later released and taken back to the capital, where he is advised not to go to the police, since it won’t help and the kidnappers have contacts there. He wants to thank the negotiator and asks if he had any doubts about representing him, to which the negotiator replies there are no bad people, only mistaken people perhaps. This is the last time they speak to each other.

The third perspective is that of the director of an old people’s home during Covid. One of the residents is a woman who previously took part in the negotiations, but who, twenty-five years later, has lost her memory. Precautions are in place – those who have been infected are kept upstairs, the more serious cases are taken to hospital, eleven people have died already. Those who are well are allowed to take walks in the grounds in pairs for 10-15 minutes. The director of the home is so worried about infection that she has rented an apartment nearby to avoid being with her family. The woman with dementia has gone missing. The director has been touched by her story. A younger man who has spent time in prison because of his involvement with terrorism used to come and visit her. She senses that there was a certain intimacy between them. He is a painter, and the woman would visit his studio to pose as a model. She asks to be kept informed, but the woman has still not returned. The next day, there are more cases of residents being infected. The director decides to inform her superiors about the woman’s disappearance. The police come and search her room, ask about her friendships with people in the home or outside, check what she is reading (novels, a philosophical essay relating to politics, poetry). The director speaks to the painter, who to start with is angry that the police have been to see him in his studio, but who then explains about his relationship with the woman – they are the two younger ETA representatives from Algiers, whom the negotiator suspected of being lovers. The director and the painter talk on the phone for half an hour. The director wishes she had paid more attention to the woman, who kept herself pretty much to herself. The next day, the director pays the painter a visit in his studio and sees some of his paintings of the woman. Later, she receives a message that the woman has been found in an abandoned warehouse at some distance from the home. She was delirious and soaked, and kept on asking about a kidnap victim, saying they had to find him. She is now under observation in hospital and due to return to the home in the coming days.

The fourth perspective is that of the negotiator’s daughter, and the son of one of ETA’s representatives. A woman visits a place she calls a “dark box”, where everybody is naked and sexual contact is made in the dark. You’re never sure who your partner is. The woman then goes to a nearby café, where she wonders whether some of the other customers – the waitress who serves her coffee, a man who seems to be staring out of the window – might be people she encountered earlier in the dark. Even though she is clothed, it is now that she feels more naked, and this excites her. The woman is the negotiator’s daughter. She remembers when her mother died, how her father was absent, trying to save the life of someone even he didn’t know. She studied physics at university, but had a breakdown in her final year and stayed all the time in her room, watching television, in self-imposed confinement. She would like to know that her father at least thought about her when he was away. She is in her forties and separated. She goes back to the dark box, has contact with a man and a woman whose sighs she can hear, then goes to another café, where again she wonders if some of the people have been in the dark box.

The woman’s father has retired to a village with only thirty inhabitants, where there is no drinking water, and has converted the old church into a residence. The woman describes how, sixteen years after the negotiations, her father took her to Algiers, where they met up with the old waiter (whom her father suspects of not being a waiter) and returned to the hotel where the negotiations took place and to the hotel where he stayed. The visit has a cathartic effect on her father, who is able to replace old memories with new ones. The woman returns to the dark box, but is not in the mood and asks to leave. Another time, she has contact with a man and remembers visiting a beach with seagulls with her father. She is part-owner of an academy; her partner wishes to sell her share and carry out research in a British university. When she goes to a café afterwards, she mistakenly thinks an old man sitting there is her father.

The woman goes back to a café where the coffee is awful and the milk is burnt. She has a call with the director of the performance – this is what the dark box is, a performance – she has been taking part in, who asks if she has any regrets, whether she would have liked to go further or didn’t go far enough, and then invites her to meet one of the other participants. The woman wonders why she was chosen for this project. She is afraid to agree to the director’s proposal, but then accepts. The other person joins their conversation on the screen. He is a man in his forties with dark hair and thick lips. The woman wonders whether he was the man who touched her roughly in the dark box, or who touched her gently, and whether she had him inside her at any point. She is curious to learn his identity. In the end, he reveals that he is the son of one of the ETA representatives who took part in the negotiations in Algiers. Not only that, but it turns out that he is sitting only a few tables away from her in the same café.

This is a poetic and imaginative account of a period of Spain’s history when ETA was active and there were kidnappings. It is told from the point of view of the negotiator, but then we are introduced to other characters who have been affected by the negotiations: one took part in the initial meeting and later became a software developer; another is the director of the home where the woman in Algiers is now a resident, with dementia; and two more are descendants of the people involved, all of whom experience their own confinement – the software developer because he is literally kidnapped in Mexico; the resident of the home because she is suffering from memory loss; the negotiator’s daughter because she has lost her mother and feels cut off from the world. The idea of the zulo – the underground bunker where kidnap victims were held – has ramifications, and these are explored sensitively and convincingly by the author in this unusual narrative. In Galician, the book was shortlisted for the Xerais Prize for Novels, while an edition in Spanish has been released by Editorial Guiverny.

Synopsis © Jonathan Dunne