By Paul Carrier
Sebastião Raposa is a man on a murderous mission. He’s determined to avenge the deaths of his parents, who died in prison shortly after he fled Portugal as a teenager in 1745. Ten years have passed since he settled in England, and now Raposa has returned to Lisbon to kill the Rev. Pedro Azinheiro, the inquisitor responsible for the arrest of Raposa’s parents, Jewish converts to Catholicism.
Traveling to Portugal as a businessman under the pseudonym Sebastian Foxx, Raposa claims to be a British Catholic, to lure Azinheiro into recruiting him as a spy who can ferret out the religious “crimes” of Protestant British merchants doing business in Lisbon.
Azinheiro makes contact with Raposa, but the would-be killer puts his murder scheme on hold. Raposa first wants to find the culprit who betrayed his father to the Inquisition and stole the Raposa family’s fortune. And he feels compelled to assist the now-impoverished Charles Settwell, the Lisbon-based Englishman who arranged Raposa’s escape from Portugal as a child.
So begins David Liss’ historical thriller The Day of Atonement, a fast-paced, atmospheric novel with compelling characters and plot twists aplenty. The story, which explores the life of a young man who is reinventing himself in a turbulent and violent world, plays out against a backdrop that highlights two real-life forces in mid 18th-century Portugal.
First, there’s the Inquisition, which has faded elsewhere in Europe by 1755 but remains a repressive powerhouse in Portugal when Raposa returns to Lisbon. Then there’s the earthquake of 1755, a natural disaster so sweeping that it destroyed Lisbon — one of the largest cities in Europe at that time — in November of that year.
In an interview posted on the Random House web site, Liss says the 1755 earthquake “was a consciousness-changing event for eighteenth-century European intellectuals, who couldn’t quite comprehend how one of the world’s great cities could simply cease to exist.” While doing research on 18th-century Portugal, Liss says he “became instantly fascinated with the political corruption, religious injustice, and economic ineptitude of the period” immediately preceding the disaster.
Raposa returns to Portugal as a cunning and street-smart fighter who spent his years in England under the tutelage of Benjamin Weaver, a onetime boxer and “thief taker,” or private eye, who makes his living in London by finding missing people and recovering stolen property. (Liss fans will welcome Weaver’s brief appearance in these pages. Although he is a minor character here, he is the memorable protagonist in several previous historical novels.)
Despite his skills as a brawler and detective, Raposa’s challenge is daunting because he has pitted himself against a frightening adversary. The fanatical and all-powerful Azinheiro is zealously devoted to the Inquisition and viciously hostile toward Portuguese Jews and the sizable English merchant community of Lisbon.
Raposa’s simple quest to kill the heinous Azinheiro becomes increasingly intricate the longer Raposa stays in Lisbon. Complications mount. Neither friends nor enemies are what they seem. Over time, Raposa’s decision to punish the wicked and aide the virtuous is turned on its head.
As Raposa’s travails play themselves out, readers are treated to an evocative look at the Portuguese capital as it existed before calamity struck. “The city of hills smelled of the sea and fish and herbs and filth,” Liss writes. The streets “rang with the sound of church bells and the sight of clergy — men and women — swarming like beetles in the many colors of their orders.” Unlike in London, “few carriages were to be seen,” but here and there “were great men and women of the city within palanquins, drawn by heavily muscled Negroes whose owners treated them no better than beasts.”
The tentacles of the Inquisition reach into every corner of the city, creating a climate of perpetual fear that makes life practically untenable. Reposa’s Lisbon is a city of secrets buried under layers of deceit, where the key to survival is to avoid attracting the notice of inquisitors.
As a Portuguese Jew who was raised Catholic but remains true to his Jewish roots, even while claiming to be a Catholic from England, Raposa wears more disguises than most. When the earthquake literally swallows the city, it upends his increasingly mangled plans and sets in motion events that could dramatically alter his outlook. The reader comes away with a reminder that life often defies our tidy expectations, because the human animal may be the most baffling of all creatures.
