Book review: Your Face Tomorrow 3

Published on Friday 30 October 2009 18:22

YOUR Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías Chatto & Windus, 560pp, £18.99

THE first volume of Javier Maras's trilogy fascinated me and puzzled me. It was brilliant, but it wasn't clear where he was heading. The second volume, Dance and Dream, made the direction clearer. Now the concluding book convinces me that this is indeed one of the most remarkable novels of our time, utterly compelling, as addictive as Proust, whom Maras resembles in the demands he makes of his readers. That these demands are worth meeting is certain. I might add also that, like Proust, Maras also offers the high comedy of misunderstandings.

This novel picks up where the last one left off before tracking back to a scene we have been waiting for since the end of the first book. The narrator, Jacques Deza, a Spanish intellectual employed by a mysterious offshoot of the British secret services on account of his ability to interpret character and predict behaviour, has witnessed his boss, the enigmatic Tupra, commit an act of horrid violence. When he protests, Tupra asks him why you can't go around beating people up and killing them. There should be an answer, but Deza can't find a satisfying one. After all, Tupra points out, people do it all the time. Later he shows Deza some instructive videos: of well-known people in compromising positions, of others being humiliated and tortured, even of killings.

"Fear works," he says.

Later, back on holiday in Madrid, seeing his estranged wife and children, and his dying father, Deza learns the truth of Turpa's dictum. He discovers that his wife has a lover who, it seems, beats her up. Perhaps this is what she wants, but Deza resolves to take action. He consults Turpa: "You must get him out of the picture," he is told. If he acts on the advice, what sort of man is he becoming? Yet he knows it is true. Fear works. This is unsettling, as is a subsequent act of interpretation which has shocking consequences.

All three novels are permeated with memories of the horrors, lies and atrocities of the civil war in Spain and the war against Nazi Germany. In war, ethics take second place to expediency or, if you prefer, perceived necessity. Deza's mentor, the aged don and former spook, Sir Peter Wheeler, recounts an incident in the Black Propaganda campaign against Germany, an incident which in other circumstances would be a monstrous betrayal, and which indeed, when its full consequences are realised after the war, leads to its author's suicide. Was it a war crime? Perhaps. But then, Wheeler asks, how can we reasonably speak of war crimes when war itself is the crime? There is no answer to this question.

Maras blends fact and fiction seamlessly. He is marvellously observant and also inventive. He writes in long scenes and long rambling conversations. He is aware of the significance of gestures, of the significance of what is said and the equal significance of what is withheld from speech. He is ever alert to the vagaries and contradictions of the way people act and speak. Time and again, reflection makes the narrative loop back on itself, requiring you to alter your understanding of what has gone before. He explores the fluidity of identity; people may be what they think they are – though most of them know themselves imperfectly – but they are not only that, for they exist in quite different ways for other people.

Deza is a man of keen intelligence. In the course of the novel he not only interprets the behaviour of others, but comes to understand himself better too. In a sense the theme of the trilogy is the story of Deza's self-education. He is not quite the same man at the end of the trilogy that he was at the beginning. This is of course the theme of many great novels: of Emma, La Chartreuse de Parme, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady and La Recherche du Temps Perdu, to name only a few. In all of them the central character sheds illusions and is brought face to face with reality. And in the course of your reading you yourself acquire a comparable understanding of other people and of yourself.

There are novelists who please by their fidelity to experience and their ability to portray society and the world. They satisfy because we say that they are true to life. But there are others with a rarer talent who make us see life anew, in their terms. We don't say they are true to life, but, now and then, we find life itself echoing their works, and we say: But that's straight Dickens! Or Proust, Waugh, Hemingway or Spark.

Maras, like Andre Makine, belongs to this second category. The world looks different, people speak and act differently, after you have read his work. He reveals experience in a new light, and his imagination plays with fine intelligence on it. Your Face Tomorrow is one of the great works of modern European fiction. I look forward to re-reading the trilogy. I have no doubt that, as is the way with great novels, I shall find more in it, and much to surprise me, the second time round.