There is an irony in this novel’s title being the name of its protagonist/narrator. Tomás Nevinson has had many personae. He sometimes loses track of which character he is inhabiting. In the long middle section, when he is living undercover in a provincial Spanish city where his true identity (he hopes) is unknown to anyone, his narrative slips unpredictably from first person to third. He is “I”: Tomás, an Anglo-Spanish British secret agent with a complicated history containing lethal violence, enforced disappearances and betrayed love. But then in the very next sentence he is “he”: Miguel Centurión, an innocuous-seeming all-Spanish schoolteacher. Whoever he is, though, Tomás/Miguel has been sent to watch three women, one of whom he may be required to kill.
This is Javier Marías’s last book. Or, more accurately, it is the last part we will get of a composite work the late and much lamented author was writing for decades. It’s not a sequel or a prequel to its predecessors – those words imply a narrative progression quite alien to the way Marías operated. He preferred the phrase “companion piece”.
