borkhers | Reading

Posted by Terry

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“Perhaps. You never know.” With these four words, Javier Marías (1951-2022) ended his remarkable literary career and fifteenth novel, Tomás Nevinson. These four words also aptly characterize the level of heightened uncertainty in which he kept his readers for many of the several thousand pages of his novels, throughout all of the lengthy, winding sentences in which he often said something one way, then said it another way, then found yet a third way to suggest the very same thing, and, more often than not, found a fourth variant, leaving the reader agasp at his gift of language. And, as his narrators and characters talked themselves through situations and options, weighing the pros and cons, they usually found themselves momentarily capable of convincing themselves of any possibility.

When you feel forced to do something, the solution is to convince yourself not only that you have to do it, but that it’s the best possible option. You can always find a reason for everything, or two or three or more, there’s nothing easier than coming up with reasons and thus feeling, quite impartially of course, that you have right on your side.

That is certainly the case with Tomás Nevinson. The plot is such that I can’t reveal much without spoiling the book, and I don’t want to let anything get in the way of your reading this book. These could be some of the most luxuriant 635 pages in your near future. Tomás Nevinson is a finely tuned, thinking person’s spy novel, with several ingenious plot twists. Nevinson, a Spaniard who had thought he was retired from a career spying for England and who had returned to his position at an embassy office in Madrid, is called back to do one last field job: ferret out which of three women in a provincial Spanish town was the fundraising mastermind behind several bloody terrorist attacks that occurred more than a decade before. Following a well-worn formula in spy fiction, Marías’ spy immediately regrets his decision and wonders if he is over the hill.

I had grown rusty, my faculties and my resolve had waned, perhaps I had grown lazy. I no longer believed in the defence of the Realm, in the purity of democracies or of the Crown, nor in the aseptic nature of the State or indeed in anything . . . I wasn’t even sure I wanted to punish crimes already committed. What was the point, what did it solve, since they could not be undone?

In fact, Nevinson had only recently returned from being away for a remarkable twelve years on secret assignments, “not just a continuous absence but a continuous silence too.” During that time, he had literally been declared dead and his wife, Berta Isla, technically became a widow. (Marías’ prior novel, Berta Isla, looked at the marriage and absences from her point of view.) Now, after all the times he has been ordered away on missions over a career of some twenty-five years, into other countries, with fake identities, and into total silence, Nevinson and his wife live in separate but nearby apartments.

As Nevinson becomes more aware of being manipulated into this decision by his handler, he begins to rethink the legitimacy, even the morality, of his own role, as well as his former loyalty to his adopted country England. He looks askance at his own spy agency; in fact, he is no longer sure if he works for MI5 or MI6. “How closely,” he thinks, “our [spy] organizations resemble mafias.” Nevinson’s growing insecurity gives Marías a forum to let Nevinson ponder all sorts of spy-adjacent topics, like trust, vengeance versus justice, loyalty, responsibility, democracy, terrorists, and state terrorism. Marías also writes more freely and at greater length than in any of his prior novels about ETA, the terrorist wing of the Basque Separatist Movement. But even as Nevinson questions the authority of his own spy organization and the possible legitimacy of his previous assignments, he must also come to terms with the matter of his own complicity, his personal guilt from the actions he had taken as a secret agent of the British government for two and a half decades.

Fifteen years ago, in a post about Fever and Spear, the first volume of his Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, I wrote: “Marías uses the world of spies and spying as a vast, flexible metaphor for literature.” Many of his novels have been about spies or their literary equivalents, translators, people who sit at the cusp between two worlds, moving information from one into another. Partway into Tomás Nevinson I began to wonder if perhaps Marías didn’t sometimes think of himself as a spy on the world around him, a spy who whose duty it was to report back to us what he thought about whatever he saw. It’s a role he never seems to exhaust in his fiction. Here, it takes until page 123 for Nevinson, who narrates his eponymous novel, to finally agree to accept the job that will consume him through the remainder of the book. Until the moment that he reluctantly makes this decision, he thinks at length about his past career, his mixed feelings about his handler, and how his life as a spy (or agent) has affected his marriage and relationship with his children. (In every one of Marías’ novels, the narrators and main characters spend great swaths of time just thinking.)

Ironically, when Nevinson is finally situated in the provincial Spanish city under cover as a schoolteacher named Centurión, he often sees his spy cover as a separate character from himself. During the time he is actively working on the problem of identifying the terrorist, he vacillates between referring to himself as “I” and as “Centurión,” sometimes within the same paragraph. Nevinson seems to need this literary schizophrenia to stay sane as he goes about his final job.

Marías reproduces a single photograph in Tomás Nevinson, an image credited on the copyright page to the photojournalist Pere Tordera that shows the aftermath of a terrorist bombing on a narrow street lined with cars. A policeman “is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl, one of whose feet appears to have been half blown off, and whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain.”

It has always been easy to think of Marías as a conservative, highly traditional novelist. He’s an erudite writer of intricately plotted novels about highly educated, articulate characters who love to quote Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, William Butler Yeats, and other writers of the British and European canon. But with his death we’ve lost a writer we need now—someone humane, compassionate, and deeply moral. Late in Tomás Nevinson, the narrator has occasion to think of one of the important lessons he learned from a former MI5 instructor who taught him that: “We must always remain immune to the five contagions . . . Cruelty is contagious. Hatred is contagious. Faith is contagious. Madness is contagious. Stupidity is contagious.” Marías, always a harsh critic of the reign of Francisco Franco (who “contaminated” Spain), and who kept a wary eye on the compromises of post-Franco Spain, used Tomás Nevinson to offer some worrying opinions about the future of our democracies. “You only have to introduce a little truth into a lie for the lie to seem not just credible, but irrefutable.”

Javier Marías. Tomás Nevinson. Knopf, 2023. Translated from the 2021 Spanish original by Margaret Jull Costa.

https://sebald.wordpress.com/2025/10/22/tomas-nevinson-javier-marias-farewell-novel/

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