Fiction: It is unexpectedly challenging to find oneself reading the first volume of Javier Marías's major new novel, Your Face Tomorrow, as the world commemorates the 60th anniversary of the end of the second World War, writes Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
Despite the fact that the book's title alludes to the future, much of its content deals with contemporary perceptions of the violent upheavals of the past century. Marías begins, in 'Fever', the first part of his novel, with a consideration of the Spanish Civil War, which has become the subject of obsessive and often moralistic revisionism in Spain. But he universalises this in 'Spear', the second part, in a long speech by the character Sir Peter Wheeler, who is clearly the hero of the book.
"People hate certainty," Wheeler remarks, before continuing with this eloquent attack on the intellectual trend that we have come to call "cultural memory":
That hatred began as a fashion, it was deemed trendy to reject certainties, simpletons put them in the same bag as dogmas and doctrines [. . .] Now people hate anything definite or sure, and, consequently, anything that is fixed in time; and that is partly why people detest the past, unless they can manage to contaminate it with their own hesitancy.
The result of this, according to Wheeler, is a betrayal of the highest order:
How can a pope, a king or a prime minister assume the right to attribute to his Church, to his Crown or to his country, to those who are alive now, the crimes of their predecessors, crimes which same predecessors did not see or recognize as such all those centuries ago? [. . .]To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are now formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads.
One may or not may not agree, but Marías gives Wheeler the moral authority to pronounce thus because of his involvement, never clearly defined but frequently referred to, in both the Spanish conflict and the second World War. Once again playing with the boundary between fiction and autobiography in his writing, Marías creates a backdrop of espionage in order to develop the theme of spying as a metaphor for the writer - whether novelist or historian - as not simply a seeker of truth but a believer that truths about the past can and should be articulated.
It could be objected that certain aspects of Marías's novel undermine such a categorical view. The wishy-washy narrator of Your Face Tomorrow, a young Spaniard whose life is in turmoil following the breakdown of his marriage, is actually a foil to Wheeler, even if he idolises him. Marías's fluid, meandering sentences are likewise suggestive of uncertainty, as is his interest in the activity of translation, which is manifest in numerous comments concerning the rendering of Spanish into English and vice versa (tricky moments for any translator, which Margaret Jull Costa has dealt with masterfully).
With Your Face Tomorrow Marías initiates a debate about the interpretation of history which should concern us all, but it is too early to offer a final judgment on this novel for it is only the first volume of a projected trilogy. It places the reader on a knife-edge, building up considerable tension towards the end, only to leave it unresolved - and this reader, at any rate, simultaneously unsatisfied and expectant for more.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes lectures in Spanish at University College Dublin. Her book, Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident, is published this month by Tamesis.
Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear. By Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Chatto & Windus, 376pp. £17.99