The New Criterion

One could be forgiven for suspecting the indefatigable Spanish novelist Javier Marías of waging a one-man campaign to rejuvenate that aging and underappreciated genre, the novel of ideas. He has written over two dozen books, less than half of which have been translated into English, and for all their postmodern antics—unreliable narrators, shaggy-dog asides, a blending of the biographical and the fictional, and the radical indeterminacy of truth—there is a seriousness of purpose, an eagerness to engage with philosophical and metaphysical questions and to incorporate them into a gripping story. In an interview ten years ago, Marías outlined the intent that underlies his novels:

In my books there is not only the action, the characters, the story and so forth; there is reflection as well, and often the action stops. The narrator then makes a series of considerations and meditations. There is a tradition within the novel form, almost forgotten now, which embodies what I call literary thinking or literary thought. It’s a way of thinking which takes place only in literature—the things you never think of or hit upon unless you are writing fiction. Unlike philosophical thinking, which demands an argument without logical flaws and contradictions, literary thinking allows you to contradict yourself.

Marías’s latest, a three-volume epistemological spy novel, Your Face Tomorrow, is no different. Volume One, Fever and Spear, opens with an ironic enjoinder against ever revealing anything, even of the dead:

One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trodden the earth or traversed the world, or who, having done so, are now almost safe in uncertain, one-eyed oblivion. Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed.

Once something is said, either in confidence or openly, it takes on a life of its own which the teller cannot control, though he remains responsible for the consequences. The novel’s narrator then proceeds to tell the reader everything he might wish to know and more about his involvement with a nameless, shadowy subgroup of the British intelligence service over the course of nearly 1300 pages. The plot, such as it is, is minimal. The meat of the novel consists of digressive meditations on trust, betrayal, differing standards of morality in wartime and in peace, the contamination of violence witnessed or perpetrated, and, most importantly, knowledge.

Its title taken from Shakespeare, like several of Marías’s others, Your Face Tomorrow alludes to Henry IV’s comment, when he is still Prince Hal, to his unsuitable companion Poins shortly before he abandons his bosom friend Falstaff for duty to the State: “What a disgrace it is to me to remember thy name, or to know thy face tomorrow!” It also plays on two different kinds of knowing—recognizing and acknowledging—and on betrayal. Marías’s narrator, Jacques Deza, a Spanish translator living in London, is charged by his mysterious employers with not only analyzing the lives and identities of various subjects, but also predicting what they might be capable of and how they might change. In short, he must recognize the faces they have worn and those faces they could wear tomorrow. He and his colleagues are “interpreters of people or translators of lives.” They write reports on strangers, some of whom they interview directly, some of whom they learn about only second-hand. At first, Deza meets the challenge with relish. He is happy to interpret these lives for no evident purpose. The pay is good and the work varied and interesting. Goaded by his boss, Bertram Tupra, he weaves increasingly elaborate tapestries of intuition and speculation around his subjects. Doubts gradually set in but are easily dismissed.

Only after being made an accomplice to his boss’s violent intimidation of a pretentious but harmless attaché to the Spanish embassy does Deza demand explanations. Tupra offers the convenient moral calculus that this lesser evil was necessary to prevent a greater one, then takes Deza to his home and shows him videos of prominent people from various countries—celebrities, government officials, exemplary citizens—committing crimes or acts of extreme, often sadistic, violence that the organization keeps filed away for future use. “The State needs treachery,” Tupra explains, “venality, deceit, crime, illegal acts, conspiracy, dirty tricks (on the other hand, it needs very few acts of heroism, or only now and then, to provide a contrast). If these things didn’t exist, or not enough, the State would have to invent them.”

This surveillance organization, Deza later learns, was founded by MI5 and MI6 during the Second World War as an outgrowth of the campaign against “Careless Talk.” Government officials realized how much could be learned by simply listening, carefully and intently, to people talking. They expanded their mission to spreading black propaganda in the Axis countries and continued their intelligence and disinformation campaigns throughout the Cold War, but were rendered superfluous by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Terrorism and the bombing of the World Trade Center revitalized the group somewhat, but there were still many Sovietologists, bereft and demoralized, on its payroll. In order to put them to use, the organization reputedly began accepting clandestine contracts from “industry and the financial world, both from the public and the private sectors,” but its interpreters have no way of knowing whether their assignments are serving their country or merely its economy.

The theme of wartime behavior carried over into peacetime is developed along a parallel strain as Deza searches out any available information he can find about his father’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Juan Deza, a man as devoid of cynicism as Tupra is rife with it, is a character based on Marías’s own father. Juan Deza serves as a foil for the novel’s second major theme, also alluded to in the title, the question of betrayal of one’s friend or one’s country. Shortly after the end of the war, a close friend and fellow reporter falsely denounced Juan Deza to the Francoists as having written for Pravda. Although he only narrowly escaped execution, Juan never sought to expose his former friend. It is a wound Jacques cannot stop probing. Unable to understand why his father had allowed himself to be taken in by this friend or his noble restraint from revenge after the war, Jacques is repeatedly thrown back upon the questions that govern his work: How much can we know and how much do we want to know? How much truth, or at least unpleasant information, about those closest to us and about ourselves are we willing to face?

Although Jacques Deza recognizes the extent to which he has been contaminated by the group’s poisonous ethos, he cannot bring himself to leave. Even after maiming his ex-wife’s lover, an act of violence Deza would have previously found inconceivable, he stays with the group. It is only when he suspects that Tupra might have staged one of his more speculative and lurid reports to incriminate its subject, sacrificing a young boy in the process, that Deza’s moral disgust spurs him to action.

At this point, more than two-thirds of the way into the trilogy, the central relevance of one of the more sustained and recurring digressions, that of “narrative horror,” becomes clear. While “interpreting” a popular but waning performer given the alias Dick Dearlove, Deza elaborates his theory that some people could be driven to extremes by the fear that a compromising action or sordid event might overshadow the story of their lives. Someone like Dearlove, he suggests, would be willing to kill in order to protect his reputation. Whereas most of Marías’s digressions are meditative or philosophical, this one serves as a plot device.

True to the spirit of Tristram Shandy, which he translated into Spanish decades ago, Marías has summed up his narrative strategy: “I progress as I digress.” His digressions—sometimes riveting, sometimes tedious and repetitive, occasionally amusing—have caused critics in Britain to anoint Your Face Tomorrow a Proustian roman-fleuve. The novel’s motion, however, is rather more like that of a tidal pool: alternating currents of thoughts wash over the narrative and each time the tides recedes, the ground looks much the same except for pieces of flotsam—a thematic variation or a new facet of a character—which change the significance of all that surrounds them.