An espionage thriller in sinuous slow motion, Tomás Nevinson is the final novel from Javier Marías, who died in his native Madrid last autumn at the age of 70. It centres on an eponymous ex-spy (featured in Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla) coaxed out of retirement for one last job: to catch and potentially kill a terrorist gone to ground in northern Spain after bombings in Barcelona and Zaragoza. Trouble is, there are three suspects – all women – and it may not actually be any of them...
Tomás poses as a schoolteacher, Miguel Centuriòn, to watch their comings and goings as well as those of the men associated with them, from a petty drug dealer to a corrupt local politician. When someone tells Tomás that spies are “interpreters of people”, you sense Marías can think of another trade in that game, too; the core of the novel is essentially a series of interlinked short stories in which fictional narration itself seems a form of surveillance, as the protagonist’s mission offers a pretext for a small-scale panorama of village ways, anchored to a scrupulous weighing up of the moral and psychological implications of the hit he’s been hired to carry out.
It’s serious stuff – without warning, Marías drops in a photograph of real-life bomb victims early on – but there’s room for lightness as well, not least in his depiction of erudite spooks reaching for TS Eliot’s Four Quartets or an analogy with the reign of Henry VIII to figure out a relationship conundrum. When Tomás says he once met the Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (“passing myself off as a Spanish novelist”), I swore I saw the jacket photo of Mariàs wink; Tomás even uses as a cover story the idea that he’s writing a novel of village life in northern Spain.
