Your Face Tomorrow 2. Dance and Dream

"Your Face Tomorrow", Javier Marias' dazzling unfolding magnum opus is a novel in three parts which began with "Fever and Spear" (Chatto 2005). Described as an 'intriguing and audacious experiment' ("Sunday Times") and an 'outstanding spy novel of ideas' ("Independent"), the book now takes us even deeper into the dark world of Jacques Deza as, in volume two, his relationship with his shadowy boss, Bertram Tupra, becomes increasingly disconcerting. Jacques Deza is in a kind of limbo. Separated from his wife and child, living in London to make a break from Spain, he has found work with an M16-like organisation who employ him for his acute powers of observation and insight into human nature. But, as Jacques discovers to his cost, it is not possible to distance yourself from other human beings entirely. Just to listen to someone asking you a favour, however insignificant, is to become implicated in their lives. And when your boss forces you to watch him lure a man into a nightclub toilet and threaten to execute him with a sword, your innocence is definitely suspect. Jacques finds himself remembering his father's horrifying stories of the Spanish Civil War ...Will Jacques manage to remain morally unharmed and will Marias sustain this novel's brilliantly digressive dance? The reader longs for volume three in order to find out.