"If I don’t write for a period, I don’t worry about it. I live very quietly without doing it."
Javier Marías
The final book in Javier Marías's Your Face Tomorrow trilogy has been met with a critical cheer, and concludes an ambitious exploration of ideas that's been compared with Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. He talks to Viola Fort.
Half an hour before I meet Javier Marías, his PR calls to ask if we can change the venue from the bar at the Ritz to a nearby restaurant, since the Ritz's formal dress code seemed a bit much. I arrive to find him, tieless in an open-necked shirt, sitting in a booth discussing his itinerary for the rest of his stay. He is distracted but polite, apologising for the change of plan, for the clatter and racket of the room, and for his deafness, though we both struggle to hear over the amplified din of a lunchtime service in full swing. The chink of wine glasses and the grating guffaws of expensively suited businessmen suggest that a 'working lunch' in Piccadilly does not mean a Pret sandwich and crumbs on the keyboard.
Marías occupies a strange hinterland in the UK literary world: he is a writer's writer, honoured by the literary press and celebrated by his fellow authors; with over fifteen published books, he has not yet quite impacted on the public at large, though that can only be a matter of time. This might have something to do with his distinctive writing style, which is characterised by very long paragraphs - sometimes pages long - and careful sentences full of qualifications and clarifications. He will frequently offer two or three possible words to ensure the correct meaning is arrived at, and even in translation sounds academic in a peculiarly English tradition - perhaps a result of time spent teaching at Oxford. In writing he enacts his thought processes, causing some to describe his novels as philosophical. They would not be wrong; his novels, Your Face Tomorrow in particular, are first and foremost novels of ideas. They require the reader to commit to the rigorous unpicking of an abstraction over the course of a page or a chapter, or an entire book, which, coupled with the often dense prose, can raise the drawbridge a little.
Your Face Tomorrow is a 'novel in three books', the final volume of which, Poison, Shadow and Farewell, has just been published. It traces the strange profession of Jacques Deza, a Spanish national first encountered in Marías's entirely separate 1989 novel, All Souls. In Fever and Spear, the first volume of Your Face Tomorrow, Deza is older by some years and recently separated from his wife in Madrid. The prospect of family life continuing there without him, but in every other respect unaltered, appals him, so he moves to London where he finds work in radio programming for the BBC. At a party in Oxford held by his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler, he is introduced to the mysterious figure of Bertram Tupra, who runs an intelligence operation, the aims and allegiances of which remain unclear. Deza is recruited to this group as an interpreter of people: making careful assessments of a subject's character in order to project the consequences of future scenarios. An "anticipator of histories" as Tupra calls it.
This premise allows Marías to explore at length ideas common to all his books: language and the spaces between language(s); identity and perception; and the concepts of recognition and resonance. The latter characterises both his approach to writing, and the reader's experience of it. More than any other writer, Marías's work frequently provokes a sense of déjà vu. "I have used, in my books - within the same book and also from book to book - what I have sometimes called a system of echoes," he explains, and goes on to liken this to the way certain details are threaded through a piece of music. "In music it's often very moving to recognise something that you listened to before."
Readers of Marías's work will be familiar with this system of echoes. Deza's novel hopping from All Souls to Your Face Tomorrow is but one example. Minor characters in one story assume leading roles in others ("I like the idea of not having characters of my previous novels dead forever."); names and places are cross-referenced from book to book; bells chime; music plays, dogs bark. Marías has a fondness for women named Luisa, and for the description of female legs and thighs. Like cormorants diving for fish on a pond, phrases and motifs resurface at unexpected points. "This reappearance of subjects, sometimes sentences, sometimes images, is not a mere repetition in my opinion," he asserts. "I think each time something reappears, it sheds a different light on the previous pages."
Important parts of the story are borrowed from real life. Deza's father's experience of the Spanish Civil War was based on that of the author's father, a teacher and philosopher. Julián Marías was denounced to the authorities by a close friend at a time when such 'traitors' could expect to meet their death (against all the odds he dodged the firing squad). Following his imprisonment and subsequent ban from teaching, Marías senior escaped with his family to the United States, first to Wellesley College and then to Yale, which accounts in part for Marías junior's impeccable English, which is accented, (albeit with a flavour of rarified academia; he pronounces 'knowledge' as 'noe-ledge' and 'during' as 'due-ring'), but unfailingly accurate and eloquent. The second bridge between fact and fiction finds form in the figure of Sir Peter Wheeler, whose character Marías based on Oxford don Sir Peter Russell (Peter Wheeler was his real name, he changed it to Russell when he emigrated from New Zealand as a teenager). By his own admission, Russell's name was virtually the only thing Marías changed. All other characteristics as well as many details of his life - his war record, his work for MI5 - are replicated in Wheeler.
The two men met in the 1980s when Marías was teaching at Oxford, and remained firm friends until Russell's death three years ago. Russell seems to have acted as a kind of mentor to Marias, much as Wheeler does to Deza in the books. I suggest this evidences another form of recognition; an older figure recognising potential in someone younger, even before they themselves do, and guiding them towards the discovery and realisation of that potential. "Absolutely. I think at the same time the novel was also a farewell to a generation, a world of people who were born during the First World War, like my father and Peter Russell. The world shall be poorer when those kind of people are not around." Marías is careful to avoid clouding accuracy with sentimentality, and continues with a wry smile, "Of course, the world's always poorer and also richer with each generation. I remember something William Faulkner said: that every young man should be in touch with old people, mainly with old women, more important with old women, because they are the ones that tell stories best"
He admits to being diffident about what he wants to achieve. "I don't like any pompous words like 'I need to write.'" He looks faintly disgusted at the notion. "If I don't write for a period, I don't worry about it. I live very quietly without doing it. I don't consider myself a professional writer in a sense that people who consider themselves professional writers say to themselves, 'well I must write something new again because it's two years now since my last novel.' I never felt that way." He's aware of his reputation and the position he occupies in European literature, but struggles to reconcile it with his own sense of worth as a writer. He considers the simple fact of completing a book evidence of its shortcoming. "The mere fact of my having finished [something] immediately diminishes it. If I've been able to do there's not much to be admired," he says.
The restaurant starts to empty of suits and the din has died down to a gentle hum. An inveterate smoker, Marías is looking delicately at the door. Now that he's a bit older (58), I ask, does he find himself inhabiting the role of mentor? "Not yet. Not yet," he says quickly. It's an idea he seems surprisingly uncomfortable with. Perhaps it is the suggestion that he is now old enough to become what these man once were to him. "Of course young writers come to you, having the feeling that you know more, know better," he continues. "I don't have the feeling of knowing more or better, and I think that's one of the problems for me becoming a mentor to anyone just yet." He pauses, turning the idea over, before adding, "But maybe in a short while I shall be, I hope." And with that he heads outside for a cigarette.
.................................................................................................................
Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell is published by Chatto and Windus
.................................................................................................................
Tuesday, 22 December, 2009
In Interviews
- Neel Mukherjee
- Javier Marías
- Dave Eggers
- Richard Flanagan
- John Banville
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Amit Chaudhuri
- Rana Dasgupta
- Edmund White
- Tobias Hill
- Christmas Books
- Russell Hoban
- Will Self
- Aleksandar Hemon
- Kate Summerscale
- Philip Gourevitch
- Simon Gray
- Aravind Adiga
Buy books
Written Lives
Dark Back of Time
All Souls
Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell v. 3 (Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy)
Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream v. 2 (Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy)
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear v. 1 (Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy)
Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.
Newsletter
Untitled Books
Your account
Register for an account and review books, comment on articles and build a list of your favourite reviews. Coming soon.
