This one was a real struggle. I came close to bailing on a number of occasions. Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear is billed as a sort of intellectual thriller, and it may be that as it moves into the remainder of the trilogy, but any expectations you have of intrigue need to be dialed down. The action is barely perceptible, and when I say “action" I don't mean action as in movie stunts, I mean action as in anybody actually doing anything outside talking and thinking.
Jacques Deza is a divorced man living in Oxford England, estranged from his ex-wife and family in Spain. He is recruited by a mysterious association that values his ability to read people with extreme accuracy, to the point of identifying likely future outcomes -- whether a person will succeed or fail at a given task, whether someone is capable of murder, etc. “Your face tomorrow" refers to seeing your future.
In the course of the book we meet Deza, get some background on him, meet his mentor/patron, Peter Wheeler, and follow his recruitment. Not a lot of activity there; one presumes it's set up for the sequels, but it's not the lack of action that directly causes the difficulty. Marias is simply the most long winded writer I have ever encountered. Every observation, however slight, is eligible for endless scrutiny; pages and pages of digression on the human condition flow from the tiniest of details. The effect, I gather, is supposed to be Proustian as we spiral away into novella length distractions. Or perhaps it is part and parcel with idea that this fellow Deza can see so broadly and deeply, and infer so much, based on seemingly unimportant particulars. While I acknowledge the fluidity of Marias prose and I appreciate that Omit Needless Words can be set aside for aesthetic purposes, there is such a thing as going too far.
And yet, there is good content. Deza's extended rumination on the state of his family and his estrangement reeks of a fearful, lonely humanity. And both Deza and Wheeler continue to be haunted by the past, including a common connection to the Spanish Civil War, in a way that makes it clear that the greater, more seminal idea is that the past never leaves us, which is illustrated very compellingly. But the last third of the book is an extended digression/rumination on how talk is necessarily interwoven into the human condition almost to the point where I suspected obsessive-compulsive disorder may be at work. It was exhausting.
Should you read Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear? I have to say no. There are rewards, but there is such a high price in time and effort to get them, the payoff falls short. Much of what I have read about Marias suggest that he is thought of in some circles as a preeminent literary master. Fair enough. My impression is that his interest lies entirely in the realm of the mind and since a novelist's job is to understand and display his realm, he doesn't hesitate to let every detail loose. This is probably the sort of thing that folks in academia and those with a more esoteric sense of the novel appreciate. I doubt you are one of them. I don't think I am either.
