Chatto £17.99 pp376

Javier Marias’s narrator, a Spanish academic called Jacques Deza, hardly ever stops talking, except when out-talked by his friend and mentor from Oxford, Sir Peter Wheeler. Of course, all novels in the first person are nothing but words uttered or reported by the narrator, but in this case, as in the equally verbose novels of Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, the continual unreeling of long, pell-mell sentences, elegantly constructed, rhythmic, sententious and analytical, is not just the style but in itself much of the story.

Jacques has graduated from being a teacher and translator of his native language to being “an interpreter of people” or “translator of lives”. He sits in — either openly or behind a two-way mirror — on interviews or interrogations conducted by a mysterious branch of MI5, and uses his special gift of seeing people as they really are, behind their pretensions, subterfuges, fears or boasts, to help his employers decide “what individuals, independent of their circumstances, would be capable of and thus being able to know today what face they would wear tomorrow”.

This novel, as its title suggests, is the first volume of several, so it is possible that the various shadowy characters it introduces (the narrator’s spymaster employer, his MI5 colleagues and his father, as well as himself and two Oxford mentors) will become more substantial in later volumes. But very likely they will not, since this is only obliquely a spy story. Its real thrust is philosophical and speculative, a meditation on the slippery, shifting, iridescent nature of human beings, their relationships and, above all, what they say. As the book goes on, one is reminded less of Beckett and Bernhard (although Marias certainly shares some of their distaste for human society) than of Nathalie Sarraute and W G Sebald. Towards the end of the book there are even a few grainy black-and-white illustrations in the Sebald manner, confusing the story further by suggesting that it may be partly the author’s own, fact not fiction.

The Spanish civil war, during which the narrator’s father — a journalist on the Republican side — was betrayed by a friend who defected to Franco, is a running motif, as is the second world war, when the narrator’s mentor, the Hispanist Professor Wheeler, worked in mysterious ways (not yet fully explained in this volume) for British Intelligence. But whatever revelations of skulduggery are in store, the narrator himself is surely a prime suspect. His logorrhoea is, for the “seeing” reader, a tell-tale symptom of his own weakness, the result no doubt of too much secrecy and silence behind the two-way mirror, too much power without responsibility over the fate of others, too much belief in his capacity for seeing through people. There is a fine passage in which he holds forth about the dangers of believing what others say about you: “If a film director, writer or musician begins to be described as a genius, a prodigy, a reinventor, a giant, they can all too easily end up thinking that it might be true. They then become conscious of their own worth, and become afraid of disappointing or . . . of not living up to themselves, that is, to the people it turns out they were . . . in their previous exalted creations.”

There are other passages that are not so fine — for instance, an overlong and banal disquisition on the wartime poster campaign Careless Talk Costs Lives — and which read as if they were written merely to keep the author at his desk until a better idea arrived. But for the most part this is an intriguing and audacious experiment (dexterously translated by Margaret Jull Costa) in turning language back on itself as its own untrustworthy betrayer. I look forward to the next volume.

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