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Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow And FarewellEditions
ReviewThe third volume resumes with Tupra’s response to Deza’s objection that you cannot ‘go around beating people up and killing them’. Tupra shows Deza a sequence of videos of horrific crimes by people who are, or might become, public figures, which he keeps as security measures. He insists that his own actions in the nightclub were preventative, and Deza’s fuss is futile because it’s better to be in a position to stop the monsters. The effects of all this on Deza are unpacked further during a discussion with ‘young Perez Nuix’. She has come to ask a favour (it was she who knocked on his door at the end of volume one) and there is an amusing sexual charge to their encounter. But there’s no doubt that Deza feels different after what he has seen, and Tupra’s explanations. ‘Poison’ has entered him, and it affects his behaviour in the next section of the novel where, in Madrid for a fortnight’s holiday, he is appalled to discover that his estranged wife has a lover. While recognising that he no longer has any rights over his wife, Deza believes that the lover represents a threat to his children, and so he deals with him in such a way that he will never reappear. Farewell finds Deza back in England, where, following a discussion with the dying Wheeler (who imparts personal secrets of his own), Deza leaves ‘the organisation with no name’ and returns to Spain. It was apparent from the outset of Your Face Tomorrow that it was (like most fiction) an attempt to understand how people behave, with a particular focus on the role of secrecy and lies. Now it emerges that the structure is a sequence of rings, like the drop of blood. While the first volume dealt with the public domain and a more theoretical approach, the second volume brought a specific encounter into focus but one which nevertheless involved the narrator only as a witness. In Poison, Shadow and Farewell, Deza is an actor in the events that he is describing, and the drama accordingly shifts to how well it is possible to know oneself, and how reliably one can predict and understand one’s own behaviour and reactions to it: ‘…no one can know himself so well that he can be sure how he will behave tomorrow.’ If all this sounds schematic, it must be stressed that it is Marías’s unique style that drives his vast enterprise. Phrases and images recur throughout the work, woven into long sentences that remorselessly unpick the impulses for actions and patterns of behaviour, ‘the probabilities that people carry within their veins.’ If the word ‘genius’ carries any meaning, Your Face Tomorrow is a work of genius. From my review in the Literary Review - review by John de Falbe |
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