May 2019 book review

YOUR FACE TOMORROW, by Javier Marias:
Vol I- FEVER AND SPEAR
Vol II- DANCE AND DREAM
Vol III- POISON, SHADOW AND FAREWELL
Jacques Deza, a Spaniard living in London, is recruited by a shadowy offshoot of the intelligence services for an unusual job. He must use his peculiarly acute observational skills and insight of the human psyche to decide what any given person might do tomorrow, based on little more than listening in to that person being interviewed, and reviewing their past behaviour. Gradually he realises there is a lot riding on his opinions - people could lose their jobs, be hurt, or even killed if he gives a negative prediction. But the job does give him the opportunity to encounter some the cleverest people in England, and in turn to find out how they themselves operate. And it isn’t always a pretty sight...

This is really one novel in three parts; indeed the books literally take up where the previous one ended. And as we immerse ourselves in his sublime, limpid prose, we learn that Marias, like Proust, like Sebald, like Nabokov before him, is fascinated by the concepts of time and memory as they relate to Homo Sapiens. How we age, and what this does to the memory, is something the great writers seem perennially obsessed with, though we should not be surprised at that. We are our memories, which is why Alzheimer’s is such a terrible disease.

To give one short quote from a book of nearly 300,000 words is scarcely sufficient to do it justice. Nonetheless, I offer this, from the second volume:

“...I am like the earth beneath the grass or even deeper down, like the invisible earth beneath the still more sunken earth, a dead man for whom there was no mourning because he left no corpse, a ghost whose flesh is falling away and who is only a name for those who come afterwards and who will never know if  that name was invented... I am snow on someone’s shoulders, slippery and docile, and the snow always stops falling. Nothing more. Or rather this: ‘Let it be changed into nothing, and let it be as if what was had never been.’ That is what I will be, what was and has never been. That is, I will be time, which has never been seen, and which no one can ever see...”

Marias is 68 now, the same age as me, and many people feel he is overdue for the Nobel prize. Some say he should have been given it rather than Bob Dylan, though I for one applauded that audacious decision. OK, so give it to him now. He deserves it.

A REED SHAKEN BY THE WIND, by Gavin Maxwell
In the early 1950s, a young Gavin Maxwell’s big hero is Wilfred Thessiger, the eminent writer and traveller. He hears Thessiger is off on his travels again soon, this time to southern Iraq to spend time among the Marsh Arabs. On a shot to nothing he arranges a meeting in London and asks if he can tag along. To his amazement Thessiger agrees, while trying to put him off by listing the various risks, disease, injury and murder among them. Maxwell isn’t listening. Thessiger has agreed!

A few short days later and Maxwell finds himself in an alien world. A world of waterways, vast skies, endless expanses of marsh and reeds and the mixed bag of tribes who inhabit it, living in ways that have not varied for a thousand years. Now Maxwell finds the principle dangers are not only members of other tribes, but also wild boar, who lie concealed in the reeds minding their own business, but liable to go nuts if disturbed. Thessiger has warned him about this, though he can’t really see the problem until one day one incensed boar decides to go for him. There are other dangers too, such as the fear of humiliation if he fails to come back with a sufficient number of kills from a hunting expedition. Arabs have a very big thing about loss of face, and this of course extends to their guests...

This book has been described as being “almost the perfect travel book” and it is hard to argue with that assessment. The writing is as beautiful as the strange lands he describes, and is laced with intriguing insights into Maxwell’s own psyche. And that is what good travel writing is all about...