Fiction: That contemporary master novelist, Nobel prize winner José Saramago,once remarked to the English translator of Blindness, surely one of the finest and most disturbing novels to have been written in any language in the last couple of decades, that, in his case at least, normal conventions of punctuation and syntax needed to be forsworn in order to allow for an untrammelled "continuous flow".
Some of Saramago's "sentences" in that novel run to several pages. The novelistic style of Spanish novelist Javier Marías is not dissimilar, though the import and substance, alas, are less weighty.
Your Face Tomorrow is not quite a trilogy, but a novel in three volumes, the second of which, Dance and Dream, takes us further into the life and times of one Jaime, alias Jacobo, alias Jacques, Deza, who has come to England from Madrid after his marriage break-up. He has lived alone in London, and has worked for the BBC. On a visit to Oxford, he has been recruited by former spy Prof Peter Wheeler, "an eminent and now retired Hispanist", to work with an enigmatic boss, Bertram Tupra, alias Reresby, for an MI6-like organisation. Deza is engaged as an "observer" and "interpreter" of events and people. But the nature of his "interpretative" work is unclear, to say the least.
The climactic episode of the novel is a nightclub toilet scene in which the hapless Deza is compelled to witness what might conceivably turn into a nasty denouement, namely the execution with a sword by Tupra of Deza's arch-enemy, a zany, drug-addicted womaniser, a fellow Spaniard, Rafa de la Garza, who has a sinecure at the Spanish Embassy.
Readers of earlier and better novels by Marías, for example A Heart So White (1992), which won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, and Tomorrow in the Battle, Think on Me (1994), will be aware of the author's fascination with sudden and inexplicable violence and death. Intimations of, and reflections on, mortality are in abundance here in Dance and Dream, too.
But this new novel exasperates. Part of the problem is that Marías, who spent a formative period of his life at Oxford, where he taught, has never quite disengaged himself in his fiction from autobiographical concerns. An Oxonian nostalgia permeates this novel and its predecessor, Fever and Spear. The narrator comments near the end: "while I might not have left any mark on Oxford, my time there had certainly left a mark on me".
So much of the dialogue in this novel is arch and mannered. An obsequiousness makes itself felt in the constant name-dropping: "Hatchard's bookshop in Piccadilly which I had visited so often, following in the footsteps of past notables, Byron and Wellington, Wilde and Thackeray, Shaw and Chesterton".
At one point, Tupra says to Déza: "You're not paid to ask questions". But the reader wants at least to feel the necessity of the many questions that are asked in the novel. In Dance and Dream, are we made to care about the shenanigans of the British Secret Service? I doubt it. There is an arbitrariness in the endless divagations and meanderings undertaken by Deza and his antipathetic boss, Tupra. The seemingly interminable scene in the nightclub toilets (the "Ladies", it so happens), far from producing tension, is simply perplexing. What is the point of it all, we are impelled to ask? Compare this novel with García Márquez's brilliant short novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, where the reader feels the urgency of the questions asked surrounding a death, even though the answers are not provided within the frame of that novel.
A contiguous "story within the story" of Dance and Dream has to do with Deza's Spain, a Spain of the present and the past. At various moments, Deza evokes conversations and scenes with his ex-wife, Luisa, and, more importantly, with his father, who lived through traumatic moments during and after the Spanish Civil War. These moments, particularly the horrific story of grotesque torture and death inflicted on the "son of a Commie mayor", ring true and are indeed moving.
Perhaps unfairly, I see Javier Marías as a writer who appears curiously and anxiously burdened by his Oxford experience. A somewhat narrow patch of English life has inexplicably disabled, rather than enabled him as a writer. As we await the third volume of this novel, perhaps a final judgement of its worth should be held in abeyance.
Ciaran Cosgrove is head of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College Dublin
Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream By Javier Marías Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Chatto & Windus, 341 pp. £17.99