Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías
James Lasdun
Sat 21 Nov 2009 00.07 GMT
Your Face Tomorrow III: Poison, Shadow and Farewell
Part two of Javier Marías's metaphysical epic, Your Face Tomorrow, culminated in one of the more bizarre scenes of recent fiction. Jacques Deza, a Spanish academic recruited into a nameless sub-section of MI6, finds himself in the handicapped lavatory of a glitzy London disco, looking on helplessly as his boss, Bertram Tupra, attacks a young Spanish diplomat with a sword – "a double-edged Landsknecht sword", no less – breaking several of the man's ribs before all but drowning him in the lavatory.
At once comical and appalling, absurd and yet governed by its own weirdly invincible logic (the oafish diplomat has been dancing too close to the wife of a mafioso contact of Tupra's and has scratched her face with his hairnet – yes, his hairnet – so naturally must be punished), the scene leaves Deza shocked, both by his boss's violence and by his own failure to interfere. "You can't just go around beating people up, killing them," he protests as they leave. To which the imperturbably ruthless Tupra replies, "Why can't one do that? Why can't one, according to you, go around beating people up and killing them?"
The retort takes us to the heart of this extraordinary enterprise, its essential moral conundrum, and is repeated early on in the third and final instalment, Poison, Shadow and Farewell. Here, the slow-motion delirium of that evening at the disco continues with Tupra driving Deza to his house in Hampstead in order to show him clandestine footage of public figures participating in compromising scenes that include torture and bestial rape. The footage is intended to force Deza to reconsider his own assumptions about what is and is not morally permissible – would it not be permissible to harm these people? – and it succeeds with a vengeance.
In the mesmerising narrative that follows, the basic situation of doing harm unto others is revolved in a series of episodes in which Deza implicates himself, directly or indirectly, deliberately or by passive acquiescence, in various acts of violence, the most dramatic and disturbing of which is a savage beating that he inflicts on his estranged wife's abusive lover. These scenes are framed by brutal episodes from the Spanish civil war in which Deza's father (modelled on Marías's own father) was victimised by the Francoists, and then further refracted through allusions to the effective but morally questionable disinformation tricks perpetrated against German civilians during the second world war by the "black propaganda" intelligence unit, predecessor to the unit Deza himself works for.
Between these episodes, and within them, Marías probes the psyches of his characters with an exhaustive, hyper-articulated precision, assessing in minute detail the effects of their actions on their sense of who they are. Who they are today, and who they are going to become "tomorrow" (the phrase "Your Face Tomorrow" is adapted from a line in Henry IV where Hal begins to realise that he is turning against his former companions). One knows, for example, that the Deza cold-bloodedly smashing the hand of his wife's lover is no longer the Deza he was before he began stalking the man through the Prado and the streets of Madrid (richly sinister scenes); that however understandable and even necessary his actions may be, a rupture has occurred, and that a reckoning is going to be required. Much of the disturbing force of this prolonged central episode comes from the mutually exclusive moral perspectives through which we are made to view it. The book as a whole functions as a kind of experiment in forensic ethics: a study of the shifting aspect of good and evil over time.
As in any ambitious experiment, the context has to mimic the real world while at the same time enhancing the focus of the investigation, and to this end a certain selective distortion is employed. Describing the odd "enchantment" of Tupra's house in Hampstead, Deza says: "There came into my mind the image of a more welcoming and, in fact, unusual, but, how can I put it, not entirely non-existent London . . ." The last phrase is applicable to the entire version of reality offered by the book, which is certainly unusual and yet "not entirely non-existent". On the one hand there is the solid factuality of the underpinning – the historical material (documented by Sebaldian photographs), the fastidious, engagingly raffish erudition that revels in every aspect of English and Spanish life, from obscure etymologies to the cheesiest scraps of celebrity culture. On the other hand there are those dreamily perverse oddities – that sword, another attack by spear, and of course the whole preposterous yet somehow compelling nature of Deza's spy-work, which, in keeping with the book's abiding preoccupation, consists of "interpreting" individuals of interest to his boss: analysing their characters and predicting their future behaviour, their "face tomorrow"; a metaphor, among other things, for the art of the novelist himself.
All of which suggests, perhaps, a rather solemn, self-important book, whereas Your Face Tomorrow is in fact a work of sublime lunacy, closer in spirit to Sterne or Cervantes than some of the more modern mega-tomes – A la Recherche, for instance – to which it has been compared. (Musil might be more apt than Proust, with a dash of Anthony Powell to take care of its peculiar Englishness, but even that fails to do justice to the book's sheer waywardness.)
I should say that it took me a while to succumb to its charms. There isn't much of the instantly gratifying, high-gloss surface detail by which novels in the more empirical Anglo-American tradition ingratiate themselves with their readers. Nor is there much attempt to differentiate characters in terms of how they speak or think (odd, perhaps, in a book that consists largely of people talking or thinking out loud). And the ratio of action to abstract speculation feels rather low at times, especially in the first volume, where the ruminative passages often seem to expand more by repetition and tautology than the actual development of a thought. But as the work proceeds and the wonderfully macabre dramas begin to fill out the large intellectual frameworks, and all the recurring motifs – the mysterious drop of blood Deza finds at the top of a staircase, for example, or the notion he calls "narrative horror" whereby a famous life such as JFK's or Jayne Mansfield's is overshadowed by an infamous death – begin to release their implications, so one becomes increasingly aware of the book's immense boldness and originality.
Its humour, too; aside from being one of the most poised and cultivated of fictional narrators, Jacques Deza is also one of the most amusing. His defiantly snobbish asides on the trashiness of our times are priceless, while the situations he finds himself in, however unpleasant, almost always have something farcical about them that keeps laughter in play along with horror.
A little patience, in other words, is required of the reader, but it is amply rewarded. By the second volume all cylinders in its large and powerful engines are purring smoothly. And with this triumphant finale – the longest and best of all three – it becomes impossible to resist the thought that this deeply strange creation, with its utterly sui generis methods, its brilliant disquisitions on love and loss, its dark playfulness, may very well be the first authentic literary masterpiece of the 21st century.
James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Jonathan Cape.
THE GUARDIAN
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