With the publication last year of Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first volume of a trilogy and his eighth translated work of fiction, it was plain that Javier Marías was embarking on a project which required readers to leave behind all conventional ideas of what a novel is. At one point in the book the narrator cleans up a drop of blood. On the last page, someone rings his doorbell. There are no other events. But for patient readers with a speculative cast of mind and a taste for stylistic adventure it seemed to be a work of genius.
The second volume, Dance and Dream, confirms this. Jacques Deza is a Spaniard living in London. Because of his acute powers of insight into other people, he has been taken on by a mysterious MI6- like agency to evaluate other people. The narrative, if you can call it that, deals briefly with the visitor and then follows Deza to a nightclub with his boss, Bertram Tupra, and a client, where a shocking event occurs. That’s all. Except it isn’t, because what interests Marías is not the events themselves but how they can be predicted, or how any event or action can be predicted from a shrewd understanding of a person. How can you know how someone will behave? In the first volume he explored this through different kinds of secrecy and lies, relating in particular to the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Andreu Nin. The new volume picks up on these themes but extends further to illuminate the ways in which causal chains bind people, or remain latent within them. ‘They carry their probabilities within their veins, and time, temptation and circumstance will lead them at last to their fulfilment.’
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