Interpretation of Language, Lives and Spies by Larry Rohter

Interpretation of Language, Lives and Spies
by Larry Rohter

YOUR FACE TOMORROW

Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

By Javier Marías

Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Illustrated. 546 pages. New Directions. $24.95.

For the best part of a decade the Spanish novelist Javier Marías occupied himself with “Your Face Tomorrow,” an ambitious, sprawling project that became both a commercial and critical success across Europe. The third and presumably final volume, “Poison, Shadow and Farewell,” has finally appeared in English, and for better or worse, it is largely of a piece with the 700 pages that preceded it.

On the surface “Your Face Tomorrow” is a strange hybrid. It is almost as if Henry James or Marcel Proust decided to write a novel set in John Le Carré’s world. There are occasional bursts of action and much clandestine skulduggery. But “Poison, Shadow and Farewell,” like the two previous volumes, “Fever and Spear” and “Dance and Dream” is essentially a rumination on several of the Really Big Themes that tend to captivate great writers: love and death, power and violence, and, above all, betrayal, loyalty and deceit, both personal and at the level of the state.

“Your Face Tomorrow,” whose title comes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, is not a trilogy. It is a single novel that because of its bulk has been published in three parts, so a reader starting with “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” is certain to be puzzled by many of the final volume’s references, characters and themes as Mr. Marías tries to tie things up. In Spain, where Mr. Marías, 58, also writes a column for El País, the leading newspaper, his publisher did the logical thing and reissued “Your Face Tomorrow” last month as a single volume. That is a step that sooner or later ought to be emulated here.

The protagonist of all three books is Deza, a middle-aged Spaniard called Jaime by his estranged wife but known to others variously as Jack, Jacobo, Jacques, Diego and Iago. At the start Deza has just left Madrid, fleeing his crumbling marriage, for London, where he is recruited from a job at the BBC to offer “translations of persons or interpretations of lives,” working in “a building without a name” for what he believes, at least initially, to be a particularly shadowy branch of British intelligence.

Most of “Fever and Spear” takes place on a single night, during and after a party at the house of an Oxford don and retired spy who is Deza’s intellectual mentor, with a bit of mystery thrown in regarding the origin of a spatter of blood on the stairway. In “Dance and Dream” Deza, now working for the spy agency, becomes the accomplice, at first unwittingly and then unwillingly, to a chillingly measured act of violence that his boss unleashes in the handicapped restroom of a tacky London nightclub.

The focal point of “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” is another outburst of violence, but this time Deza is its initiator and not an observer. This both exhilarates and perturbs him, and it underlines the significance of a declaration by Iago in “Othello,” cited throughout the novel’s three volumes: “I am not what I am.” Though Deza is extremely skilled at divining the character and motives of others, from military officers contemplating coups to mobsters and decadent pop stars, he appears unable to understand himself or even anticipate his own behavior.

“Poison, Shadow and Farewell” opens and ends with a dedication to Mr. Marías’s father, the philosopher Julián Marías, who died in 2005, and to Peter Russell, an Oxford professor and former intelligence operative who was Britain’s leading academic authority on Iberian history and culture until his death in 2006. In a fundamental sense all of “Your Face Tomorrow” is an extended homage not just to the two men, both of whom appear in slightly altered guise in the novel, but also to their entire generation. During the course of the work Mr. Marías turns repeatedly to the times of World War II and the Spanish Civil War, which he seems to view as more serious than ours, for examples of the moral dilemmas that are perhaps his central concerns, drawing on the experiences of his father and Russell.

Mr. Marías is a writer of enormous erudition, and he is not shy about demonstrating it. At various points in “Your Face Tomorrow” he offers disquisitions on topics ranging from medieval swords and the best sources of bespoke shoes to the London underworld of the 1960s. Shakespeare, Cervantes and other towering literary figures are constant references, and though Mr. Marías often treats popular culture with disdain, he doesn’t stint on that count either: Henry Mancini and the country music ballad “The Streets of Laredo” both figure in the plot, as do the B-movie bombshell Jayne Mansfield, her breasts and her grisly death.

Mr. Marías spent parts of his childhood in the United States while his father was in exile from Franco’s fascism and is essentially bilingual. As a younger man he had a parallel career as a translator; his credits include renderings of “Tristram Shandy” and works by Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov and Updike into Spanish. That background clearly influences “Your Face Tomorrow.”

It is not just that Deza, like characters in some of Mr. Marías’s earlier novels, is a type of interpreter who has sacrificed his own voice, but also that he becomes a vehicle for Mr. Marías’s fascination with the relationship between Spanish and English and how the differences, similarities and false cognates shape the way speakers of each language experience the world. (Margaret Jull Costa’s translation, it should be mentioned, is superb.)

But the enormous breadth and length of “Your Face Tomorrow” are both strengths and liabilities. Mr. Marías often embarks on elaborate divagations that sometimes prove hard to sustain. His style is anything but crisp: a random count revealed numerous sentences that run for 200 words or more, and Marías often resorts to three or more verbs or adjectives when one will do.

Even allowing that some of his characters are intellectuals given to philosophic speculation, their conversations, though absorbing, do not ring true. Instead they have the ring of monologues that are thought or written rather than spoken.

“Your Face Tomorrow” requires patience, effort and intellectual discipline of the reader. “Poison, Shadow and Farewell” delivers a payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/25/books/25book.html