A splendid swansong for Spain’s king of spy fiction

Javier Marías had already established himself as the leading Spanish novelist of his generation by the time he turned to spy fiction with his mighty Your Face Tomorrow trilogy (2002-07), but when he died last year the obituaries concluded that his espionage novels were his greatest achievement: the conventions of the genre provided the perfect framework for his investigations into the essentially amorphous and unknowable nature of human character.

Nobody who picks up the latest (and last) of his novels is likely to mistake it for a work by, say, Ian Fleming. It begins with a mission-briefing that lasts for well over 100 pages, complete with lengthy philosophical digressions, as psychopathic spymaster Bertram Tupra persuades burnt-out ex-agent Tomás Nevinson to take on one last job. (Tupra also threatens to stab a noisy fellow diner at the café he and Tomás are talking in, which I don’t recall M ever doing.) This bravura extended opening proves a worthy swansong for Tupra, established in Your Face Tomorrow as one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction.

The remainder of the book, which is set in 1997, is less intense but still compelling, although the plot is nonsensical. Nevinson (whom we first met in Marías’s previous novel, Berta Isla) goes undercover in a provincial Spanish town tasked with working out which of three female residents is the former IRA terrorist who played a role in the Hipercor bombing of 1987 while on secondment to Basque nationalist group ETA. He is instructed to kill her if he can’t find enough evidence to convict her.

He begins an affair with one suspect and spends queasy hours viewing secret-camera footage of the other two.  This primarily comic and erotic story becomes darker as it encompasses the real-life murder of politician Miguel Ángel Blanco. The friction between the heinous real events at the book’s core and the spoof-ish nature of the storyline gives it a charge that’s deliciously discomfiting.

What really makes his novels enthralling, however, is the irresistible ruminative, allusive narrative voice (assigned here to Nevinson: a far more convincing match for the Marías voice than his wife Berta Isla, who narrated the previous book). Here he is chewing over his reasons for resuming his morally dubious career, in a typically intricate, Jamesian, self-qualifying sentence: “the only way not to question the usefulness of what you have done in the past is to keep doing the same thing; the only justification for a murky, muddy existence is to continue to muddy it; the only justification for a long-suffering life is to perpetuate that suffering, to tend it and nourish it and complain about it, just as a life of crime is only sustainable if you persevere as a criminal, if villains persist in their villainy and do harm right left and centre, first to some and then to others until no one is left untouched.”

Grappling with the bucking-bronco sentences of a new Marías book is always an exhilarating pleasure (bouquets to his skilful long-serving translator Margaret Jull Costa for corralling them) and one I’ll miss dreadfully.

Tomás Nevinson is published by Hamish Hamilton at £22. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books