Your Face Tomorrow is a truly remarkable novel, in every way. Granted, some perseverance is needed initially, as the way in which Marias’ narrator allows his story to unfold is unique and startling, but perseverance is swiftly displaced by compulsion, and you are compelled to turn each page not so much by a racy plot as by a matchless ability to marry philosophical observation of human nature with a rapier wit and a dazzling range of allusions.

Your Face Tomorrow was published in three volumes and is divided across those volumes into seven sections: fever, spear, dance, dream, poison, shadow and farewell. The narrator is a Spaniard, married but separated, with two young children, living in lonely exile in London. His own failings led to the marital schism but his distant wife is never far from his thoughts and he often ruminates on the nature of his inevitable successor in her affections. A bored and underpaid BBC employee, this exile, Jaime Deza, is invited by a friend, Sir Peter Wheeler, an Oxford professor, to a party where there will be an opportunity to meet a man who could offer him more stimulating and remunerative work. After meeting the man, Bertram Tupra, and passing a small test set by Wheeler, Deza learns that both his old friend and his new acquaintance are, or in Wheeler’s case have been, members of a branch of the military or secret intelligence services and that they intend to enlist him, even though he is foreigner.

So Deza begins working, initially as an interpreter, for Tupra’s small, hand-picked team in a building with no name near Vauxhall Cross. Soon he is given new duties: he becomes a watcher and interpreter of people. He studies them over dinner or socially, on video recordings and from a small room hidden behind a one way mirror in the Tupra’s offices, submitting oral and written reports on whether they are to be trusted, how they might react to certain circumstances, whether they are capable of killing or beating or maiming. The work suits Deza. In an age where, according to Wheeler, no one dares to judge or define their fellows, he is not afraid to see and be certain, to know how the shadow will fall on any given face, tomorrow or the day after, or in years to come.

But gradually, Deza begins to experience a measure of unease about his role as hired sage. A young colleague asks him to compromise his professional opinion for a personal matter and in doing so reveals that private money now exerts an almost equal influence on the loyalties of the intelligence services as does national interest. His boss, Tupra, operating for the night under an alias, forces him to witness an act of calculated, cold brutality in a nightclub toilet, then reprimands him for letting slip his real name when trying to curb the violence. When Deza returns to Madrid to visit his children, he discovers that his estranged wife may be at threat from her new lover, and realises that his values and personality have been changed by his new job, by the store he now sets by subjective opinions he is now required to figure as objective truths. Above all, he learns that any secret he divines and passes on can be used in ways that he has no way of controlling, that conjecture in another’s ear is a poison loosed on the world that cannot be curbed or recalled.

Though a spy novel of sorts, Your Face Tomorrow is far removed from airport thriller fodder, and the plot is not particularly fast-moving, focusing on a small number of key events that come swaddled in the narrator’s digressive, exploratory and introspective ruminations. The Spanish Civil War is a subject he examines in detail: his uncle was one of many, many Spaniards summarily executed and his father was betrayed and denounced by a friend at the conflict’s conclusion and prevented from pursuing an academic career. Deza’s conversations with his father and Wheeler draw out the shockingly level of irrational hated and homespun violence that characterised the conflict. Wheeler and Deza also discuss the Second World War which instigated a great leap forward in terms of the range and sophistication of the duties assigned to and taken on by intelligence services. Wheeler or Marias’ revelations about black propaganda operations undertaken by British intelligence, whether fictive, authentic or exaggerated, are fascinating and wholly convincing. These two conflicts provide a context and backdrop for the intelligence gathering that Tupra’s modern agency undertakes, soundly anchoring the link between espionage and violence in the reader’s mind.

Marias’ prose in this novel is characterised by digression, long sentences and repetition. The wandering of a fertile mind is mimicked and embodied in the text and moments of high tension can suddenly give way to a few pages delving into the minds of Tupra or Wheeler or of Deza’s father. The long, baroque sentences can be daunting at first, but once you are acclimatised their rhythms begin to take on musical qualities or those of incantatory poetry, an effect that is heightened by the extensive use of repetition that sees whole passages recalled with seemingly increasing frequency as the novel reaches its climax. It represents an outstanding technical achievement, and, as far as I can tell, an appreciable degree of this virtuosity is preserved in translation (in fact, Marias has said in an interview that he prefers the novel in English). Crucially, this arguably elevated style doesn’t register as pretentious because it is grounded in some of the most accurate and cutting observations of modern life, conventions and manners I have ever encountered in fiction: any stylistic tics are fully earned through trenchant psychological authenticity. However, as almost all the major characters (Deza, Wheeler, Tupra) seem to portray twenty-first century Western life as debased, tarnished and diminished, you have to wonder where the author stands here, whether he is as misanthropic as his creations.

Your Face Tomorrow is, in short, a terrific novel. The story is so convincing, so perfectly-pitched, the context and base of allusions so rich and varied, the set-pieces and sudden flashes of action rendered so starkly and with such vigour. It represents a full, challenging and rewarding world to inhabit whilst you savour its three volumes, seven parts and some thirteen hundred pages. You simply must find the time to read and experience this unforgettable magnum opus.

Reviewed by Paul Engles

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