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Episode 10: "Your Face Tomorrow, Volume 1: Fever and Spear"
107 Plays1 year ago
And now we enter the homestretch. Over the next few episodes we'll tackle Marías' masterpiece, Your Face Tomorrow. Starting, of course, with the first volume, Fever and Spear.
Once we wrap up the Marías project we're going to take a week or so off and then we'll be back with more backlist dives and a new author whose work we'll spend some time digging into.
As always, thank you for listening.
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “Estos Dias” by Enrique Urquijo
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda.
Setting the Stage: 'Your Face Tomorrow' Trilogy
00:00:25
Speaker
Hi, Lori. How's it going?
00:00:27
Speaker
Hi, Tom. I'm doing really well. I'm very excited to dig into this Marais trilogy with you, Your Face Tomorrow.
00:00:36
Speaker
Yes, so to kind of set up a little bit of what we're going to be doing over the next few episodes, we'll be discussing Your Face Tomorrow, which was published in three volumes over the course of a few years. It's one massive 1,250-page book or what have you, but nicely consumable in three more discrete physical books.
00:01:01
Speaker
But yeah, so this week we'll be talking about the first one, Fever and Spear. And then next week will be part two. And then the final one.
Publication and Influences of the Trilogy
00:01:10
Speaker
The reason it came out this way, I think beyond simply how unwieldy 1,200 page book might be, is that, and this is just from what I've read, Maria's dedicated this book to a number of people, but specifically his father and Sir Peter Russell.
00:01:28
Speaker
both of whom were in ailing health and fairly old at that point. And he really wanted them to see a version of this. So he made the decision with his publisher to start bringing them out in this fashion such that they could actually see what I think Marie has even considered to be sort of his culmination of his work to that point. So that's part of it, which is, I don't know, fairly nice.
00:01:55
Speaker
a very kind gesture for him to make to people who matter so much to him. And I think that's also very fair. Peter Wheeler, who's a major character in the book and has appeared in other works that we've come across at this point, Thomas Nevinson, Berta Isla in particular, is based off of Sir Peter Russell. And in this novel, the main character spends an incredible amount of time.
00:02:21
Speaker
talking with Wheeler, and Wheeler gets a lot of space to expound and fill in his backstory, but also just sort of reflect upon life, what it means to talk, what it means to see. And yeah, I think it's a, I like to think it's a really wonderful thing that Sir Peter Russell had an opportunity to dig into that and see what his friend and mentee wrote of him.
Main Character: Jacques Deza
00:02:51
Speaker
All right, just to kind of quickly set us up, we are hearing from in this novel, Jacques Deza, also known as Jaime Deza, also known as Jack Jacobo.
00:03:04
Speaker
Everyone has a different name for him, but he is also the narrator, the voice we listen to from All Souls. So this is some pretty strong connective tissue from Arias. Characters have appeared in other novels kind of back and forth a little bit up to this point, but a repeat POV, this is the first time that we've come across that in his work, at least to my knowledge.
00:03:33
Speaker
So this is quite a few years after his time spent teaching at Oxford. He is in the process of a divorce. I don't believe it's finalized at this point. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's right. They are separated. He and Louisa.
Deza's Life in London
00:03:49
Speaker
So he has in order to make the
00:03:52
Speaker
the process easier on the children, but also himself and Louisa. He has left Spain, left them behind in Madrid. They have a son and a daughter, and he's now living in London, working for the BBC, and is invited at the outset of the novel to a buffet supper hosted by Peter Wheeler.
00:04:16
Speaker
Toby Rylens was his friend, the professor that he was, the older professor that he was interacting with at Oxford. Toby at this point has died, but has, as he put it, somewhat passed him along to Peter. And Peter's invited him out a few times. But in this specific instance, he wants him to come to this dinner because there's going to be one person in particular there that he would really like
00:04:44
Speaker
Jacobo, as
Significance of Meeting Bertram Tupra
00:04:45
Speaker
he refers to. I think I'm just going to call him Deza. Otherwise, we're just going to go back and forth with names. He very much wanted Deza to meet and just kind of get a sense of what does Deza think of this guy? I'd really like you to come talk to him and I don't know, maybe what your impressions are. And the man's name is Bertram Touper.
00:05:05
Speaker
our old friend, Tupra. I am more and more convinced that it might be better to see all these novels as like the Tupra Iliad or something along those lines. And maybe I'll spend time in a few years going through trying to identify where Tupra is in the background of every single one of Marius's novels. So he's invited out to this party, meets Tupra, and that kind of gets it going at the party.
00:05:33
Speaker
they don't interact very much at all. There's a Spaniard who's part of the embassy that's also been invited, De La Garza, who is, I mean, we've talked about this before, that Marius does not necessarily make diplomats look very good in his novels, but Jesus Christ, he just, this guy is a pig, is just disgusting.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, this is one of those guys that in English home, Wheeler's home with mostly English speaking people.
00:06:08
Speaker
This guy is Spanish. He sees Deza and is like, oh, another Spanish guy and just kind of like totally hangs on him the entire party and kind of makes all of this weird and actually quite funny at times commentary.
Deza's Unique Talent for Analysis
00:06:30
Speaker
to him out loud because he thinks that no one else can understand really what he's saying, all of these crude comments about the guests, particularly sexist comments about some of the women at the gathering. Yeah, just a real, I guess you'd just say asshole.
00:06:51
Speaker
Absolutely. And at one point, Doug Arza realizes or periodically realizes because he's getting hammered the entire time as well, that we were as nearby and can speak Spanish so he keeps slipping into what they're for what.
00:07:06
Speaker
days I refers to as criminal jargon, like, like just, you know, more and more guttery, more and more slang based, assuming that we were might not be able to pick up on that, which is largely true. So there is a moment where I don't think I have it marked down, but and I don't need to repeat it. But he makes some comment about like pigs and whores or something like that.
00:07:28
Speaker
that catches everyone's attention and it actually happens in the one moment that tupra and dasa are really talking and it everyone's ears perk up because no matter I mean even if they don't know what the words precisely translate to if you're seeing them a certain way and you've comported yourself a certain way throughout the the engagement they're kind of kind of know what the hell what the hell it is you're talking about um it reminded me of uh did you ever read fury by um Salman Rushdie
00:07:58
Speaker
No. It's one of the few things that rush, that's like a big gap I have is rushy. But it's one of the few things I've read by him and there's a scene where the narrator is in a cab and the guy driving it is speaking
00:08:16
Speaker
I don't think it's Hindi, something else, but he's just a steady stream, a profanity describing everyone around him and how terrible all these drivers are and so on and so on. And they're in New York City. And at the end of the car ride, the narrator is like, hey, man, just so you know, even if they don't speak the language, they can kind of tell when you're calling them sons of bitches and whatnot. Yeah, I think that there's something that's probably universal about the intonation of an insult.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So, at that point, there's this brief conversation between Tupra and Deza, and he's reflecting on whether or not Wheeler's goal in this party has actually been achieved. The party ends, and there's a lot of book in between the end of the party and the next morning where Wheeler kind of
00:09:06
Speaker
explains more of what's happening. But basically, Wheeler wanted Deza to come to this party and to kind of analyze Tupra and his date, his girlfriend Beryl, or his partner at the party. It's never explicitly stated that girlfriend
00:09:22
Speaker
That's kind of what Deza assumes and then Deza proceeds to describe a couple who are already exhausted with each other would rather be Have all their lives that other lives are separate rather be be done with it have this all behind them are some for some reason still Occasionally interacting to which we were says actually they're getting divorced and you just described exactly where they are after lives without having any real context barely any information on them and basically says like
00:09:51
Speaker
today's eye, you are like me and eventually comes out like Toby, Rylands, you're able to see. And this is something we've talked about in other books, specifically Berta Isla and Thomas Nevinson, this ability for some people to be able to look another person, get sort of a sense of them, and then be able to sort of play out what comes next. Maybe not predict the future, but
00:10:18
Speaker
narrate a likely outcome for this person's life and future actions.
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, I thought maybe if you don't mind, I would read just a little bit here on, it's quite early in the book, page 18 and into 19 that kind of I think describes pretty well what Wheeler sees in Deza and this particular talent he has to be an interpreter of lives.
Deza's Recruitment by Tupra's Organization
00:10:46
Speaker
So an interpreter of lives of their behavior and reactions of their inclinations and characters and powers
00:10:55
Speaker
of endurance, of their malleability and their submissiveness, of their faint and firm or firm wills, their inconsistencies, their limits, their innocence, their lack of scruples, and their resistance, their possible degrees of loyalty or baseness, and their calculable prices and their poisons.
00:11:17
Speaker
and their temptations and also their deducible histories not past but future those that had not yet happened and could therefore be prevented or indeed created and i think that kind of sets up pretty well
00:11:35
Speaker
kind of this talent that Wheeler sees in Desa. And we learned that Cooper recognizes it too. And it kind of sets up the novel or the title of the whole big project here, Your Face Tomorrow, because it's this kind of ability that Desa has to understand implicit things about someone just by a very close study of them.
00:12:02
Speaker
and to presumably be able to predict how they would react in the future under certain circumstances.
00:12:12
Speaker
Tuprah clearly values and is of use to his organization. At this point in the Maria's timeline, the group that Tuprah was setting up when he rerecruits Nevinson at the beginning of Thomas Nevinson is clearly well underway. It's obviously still working for the state, but also for private individuals as well. So Tuprah has taken his, taken his talents to Miami, as LeBron and whatnot said when they were making that move.
00:12:42
Speaker
And they're also clearly looking to recruit people who can do this. They want a wide range of folks that are capable of this and also able to speak multiple languages and provide them and really be able to spread their net as wide as it possibly can.
Structural Complexity of the Novel
00:12:59
Speaker
But I would say that it's interesting in that this isn't the early period of Marius, but
00:13:07
Speaker
were not quite at the thus bad begins, the infatuations, that later portion where they were so much more plot driven to a certain degree. Those novels very much move along. There might be the digressions, there might be the winding thought processes, but they don't take up
00:13:33
Speaker
50, 60, 100 pages. And that is the majority of this book. And the majority of this project is diving into particular ideas following Deza's own thought process or him listening to someone else expounding at length. I mean, the closest comp from the books I just mentioned would be in Thus Bad Begins, where the discussion of
00:13:59
Speaker
how that relationship fell apart and that taking place over several chapters and meandering along. That is the closest version to that, I would say, but it's nothing compared to this one. I mean, as I said, there's the party, there's the morning after the party, there's him starting to work for Tupra's organization.
00:14:20
Speaker
But in between, there is a lot of Deza's backstory, a lot of Wheeler explaining what he did during the war, how he came to this point, who he is in relation to Toby Rylands, but just a lot of, I guess, the chewiness of Marius, the way he writes about thinking.
Deza's Family History and Spanish Civil War
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it takes a little while for us to get to the party because Wheeler calls Deza up and invites him to this gathering and says, have I ever talked to you about Tupper before? Oh, I'd be interested to know what you think about him. And of course, Deza has been around Wheeler long enough to realize that, oh, he's going to want to quiz me after the party about my
00:15:10
Speaker
impressions of Tubera, which is exactly what happens. I mean, the party kind of clips along pretty well, particularly with the Spanish diplomat who acts like a real clown. But then after the party, when it's just Wheeler and Deza and they're sitting
00:15:34
Speaker
chatting, that's when kind of everything really slows down. And one thing that happens is that Desa learns from Wheeler, and it's just kind of a quick comment that, oh, well, you know, don't you, that I spent some time in your country during the Spanish Civil War?
00:15:55
Speaker
And that kind of results in Dezza staying up all night, kind of pillaging, not in a destructive way, but just kind of going through all of Wheeler's books, all of these ideas and impressions come to him about the history of Dezza's own family and what happened to his father, a huge betrayal during the Civil War.
00:16:18
Speaker
And then, you know, just trying to understand or, or kind of into it, maybe what Wheeler's role in the whole thing was. Yeah. And there's also, um, this is something you've pointed out in the past when we've had, uh, uh, characters like, like, like the member of the, the Royal family. Um, what was he referred to as in, uh, Tom around the bell think on me during what the.
00:16:41
Speaker
Well, in this one, there is a professor at Oxford who's at the party, Reimer, I think the name is. But his nickname is The Flask because of how much he drinks. The Flask, yes. And at one point, he's the last one to leave the party because he can barely put one foot in front of the other. And I believe he's referred to as, once we finally got the receptacle out of the house. And I'm like, oh, god, that's so good. That's such a great way of doing that.
00:17:11
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I think there is a greater scope to this one, to this novel than there is to a lot of the other works. All the other works are focused on one person. We get a very thorough accounting of Wheeler's activities and what he thought and how his life has progressed.
00:17:29
Speaker
Um, we also do, as you said, get into a bit into Deza's father. And I mean, this is mirroring what happened to Maria's father, where he was arrested, was eventually freed by the woman that ended up becoming, um, his wife and the mother of his children. And also that he would not be able to work moving forward, but it's made much, much clearer, or at least, you know, I'm not going to, I guess, guess at all the details of, um,
00:17:58
Speaker
the Maria's family history. But in this, it's made very clear that Deza's father was betrayed, that he was denounced very specifically, that his name was put forward and that person wasn't doing it under duress, was doing it in order to hurt the man. And when questioned about that by his son, he pretty much says like, I can't care about that
Themes of Betrayal and Revenge
00:18:26
Speaker
part.
00:18:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think that one of the really interesting things that that Maria says here is not only kind of setting up desert, like for this career and being able to predict people's people's future behaviors.
00:18:44
Speaker
but also having Dezza look back and recall that he very much couldn't understand and tried to question his father on a number of occasions, although he knew it was very painful for his father.
00:19:01
Speaker
Listen, this informant, this guy that had you thrown in prison was your college friend. It was someone that you knew, that my mother knew, that you guys hung out with. And really, you had never had a suspicion that he could turn on you, that he was a duplicatist person, that he was just mostly out to
00:19:28
Speaker
to promote himself and he would really do anything, you know, kick anyone under the bus in order to do that. And yeah, you just really get the feeling that Dezza just can't understand how his father didn't have some kind of suspicion about this person.
00:19:48
Speaker
That states it much better than how I put it. I think I misrepresented it a little bit. But towards the tail end of that conversation, his father says, what that former friend had done to me was so unjustifiable, so inadmissible, and so grave from the point of view of friendship that everything about him instantly ceased to interest me. His present, his future, and his past too, even though I existed in that past, I didn't need to know anything more and I had no wish to delve deeper.
00:20:17
Speaker
and to which Deza says, you're a better man than I am. Or if it isn't a question of better or worse, you're certainly freer and more astute. I can't be sure, but I think I would have sought to avenge myself after Franco died or whenever it would have been feasible to do so.
00:20:32
Speaker
So, yeah, there is that element of Dezav, his inability to to let these, I mean, to frankly turn his gift off. He wants to project in the future, but he also on some level, he also has a taste for the idea of revenge. I mean, there is the suggestion of violence at different points in this novel, which perhaps makes them even more attractive to toopra and what toopra is capable of and interest in having having happen.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think Cooper would be at all interested with in business. No, no, not one day as an operative because this guy was just kind of like, oh, you know, that happened. It was horrible for me. It's horrible for my wife, but I'm not going to not going to dwell on it. Whereas.
00:21:20
Speaker
Wheeler and Tuprah and Dezza. I mean, they're all about dwelling on someone's character. What motivates someone? What someone is thinking and feeling and intuiting and how they perceive the world and how they react to different things. You couldn't really imagine
00:21:50
Speaker
Desa's father having a child more different than Desa is from himself, it seems. I mean, do you think Desa's father is a bit like Muriel from that begins in that respect? I mean, Muriel is curious, but he chooses not to pursue it out of a sense of loyalty and out of a sense of friendship. But I don't know, I feel like it's there's certainly
00:22:16
Speaker
And I think I'm seeing this on this reading more than I did the first time around. And I read it so long ago. I mean, yeah, I didn't even have children when this came out.
00:22:29
Speaker
But there's such an undercurrent of the political in Marius's work that I think I'm seeing much more clearly through his considerations as preoccupations in the later novels. But there's certainly an idea like what do you continue to prosecute? What do you continue to concern yourself with?
Deza's Role in Intelligence
00:22:50
Speaker
What is a better way to continue to exist and to live in the world?
00:22:55
Speaker
which is a much more passive stance than say someone like Tupra would take as far as that sort of viewpoint.
00:23:05
Speaker
And on that, kind of on that level of like, what, what do you do next? What does the future hold? There's a really great description when Tupres first introduced that this is someone who could, could see well, but also could, it suggests that he's able to make the futures that he sees happen. That part of his seductiveness to both men and women is that he wants them to be seduced by him in whatever register it is that he's interested in.
00:23:34
Speaker
And as a result, he can make that happen, which is a really interesting trick there, I think, for this suggestion of him being able to embody that in his own personhood. Yeah. During this night where Deza barely sleeps, Wheeler eventually goes off to bed. Deza's staying the night there because the home is outside of London.
00:24:02
Speaker
And he says, well, I'm going to stay up. And he goes through the library. He drinks wine. He drinks coffee. He eats chocolates. And he's just going over lots and lots of books, documents, and remembering things, not only personal things about his family, his father, but he's also digging into other people that were
00:24:32
Speaker
betrayed, I would think, during the Spanish Civil War, like Andres Nin, who I have to say I didn't know anything about before I read this book the first time. And people that got caught up between the nationalists and the Republicans and were kind of caught in the crosshairs. And there's all kinds of passages that he reads about how Stalin was involved in the Spanish Civil War.
00:25:01
Speaker
I'm not at anywhere near knowledgeable about the Spanish Civil War, but it sounds like it was a really complex, complex situation. And I know that the scars of that war continued on through the country and perhaps still do even to this day. It was a very brutal and decisive type of event for the country.
00:25:26
Speaker
One of the things that was happening throughout the war is that fighting against the fascists, you had this very strange conglomeration of ideologies. And even within those ideologies, you had a lot of competition. So Nen was associated with Trotsky.
00:25:43
Speaker
which makes him undesirable as far as the Stalinists are concerned. So you have the one side fighting itself as well. And Nin is disappeared, which for a novelist and for someone who creates characters that are so terribly interested in what comes next, the uncertainty of that sort of disappearance, I think it's probably part of why it makes its way into this novel.
00:26:12
Speaker
especially considering Wheeler's own considerations of death and mortality that keep cropping up. But I will also say that if you're curious about the Spanish Civil War, this book is a pretty great primer, or at least it gives you a lot of threads to pursue, especially if this wasn't something that you spent any time with studying otherwise. Hugh Thomas comes up quite a bit. He's a major historian of the war.
00:26:42
Speaker
there are acronyms for half dozen of the groups involved. So he's doing you a little bit of a, Maurice is doing you a little bit of a service and throwing some, maybe not much depth to it, but a lot of ground covered in terms of the internal squabblings in the Civil War. Absolutely.
00:27:01
Speaker
So, you know, after this sleepless night, Dezza wakes up the next morning and goes down to breakfast rather late because he didn't go to bed until it was starting to get light outside. And Wheeler's there ready. He's ready to talk to him about what, well, I guess for lack of a better term, and it's gonna sound cheesy, but about the gift, the gift that he thinks that Dezza has.
00:27:28
Speaker
and that he thinks that Tuprah could really use. And Des at the time is working for the BBC as a translator.
00:27:39
Speaker
and doing okay. But he's intrigued by the possibility of working for Tubera, not only because it's a lot more money, but I think it's the kind of thing that interests him and also something that resonates with a lot of people right now. The schedule is very flexible. He has to be at the office sometimes, but he can also take things home and it allows him to just kind of
00:28:08
Speaker
work at his own pace with kind of studying these various characters that in many instances, at least in the beginning, he doesn't really know why Tupra has like brought him into some of these meetings or what
00:28:24
Speaker
conclusions, Tuprah is hoping that he he gleans, but but Tuprah is very curious and interested in what Dezza thinks when there are these meetings where Dezza is there, you know, ostensibly as a translator, but he knows that he's there for more than just simple translation and interpretation.
00:28:47
Speaker
In terms of the structure of the novel, the majority of this conversation over breakfast, clearly given how much they talk, must go into the afternoon because they talk forever. The majority that takes place after we've already read
00:29:02
Speaker
about Dezza's time and his introduction and his working with Tupra. So he's doing some fun things structurally of giving us a little bit more information, but then backfilling it after the fact. And I don't know, it also does put a lot more of the emphasis of what's important in this novel on what Peter Wheeler is talking about.
00:29:23
Speaker
In his time working for Tuprah, he starts working progressively more and more, basically becomes a full-time employee. He has colleagues like Mulrion and Nuix who also weigh in. And Dezza describes how he becomes even more
00:29:40
Speaker
As he gets used to the culture of the place and what's being asked of them, how he becomes even more decisive and fervent in what he thinks is going to come next for this person or that person. Making some very strong declarations about whether they would kill, how they would want to die. I think this person would absolutely murder his wife. I would stake my life on it. Those kinds of statements to
00:30:07
Speaker
further his reading his point. Um, there's a great bit about to like, it's only out last a couple of pages, but it's paragraph after paragraph describing someone, but each paragraph is describing someone completely different. And you get this free flow of like, he is just tearing apart and ripping and like just destroying and rebuilding all of these people and their lives and what will come next for them.
00:30:33
Speaker
rapid-fire succession and so that gives this really I don't know it's it's really kind of fascinating and fun it's almost like reading Maria's it writing character sketches in anticipation of a novel or short story or something well it kind of make made me a little bit uneasy that Chupra
00:30:54
Speaker
Dezza learns early on that Tupra is not interested and in fact doesn't want Dezza to admit a lack of confidence in any opinion about any person. Saying like, I'm not sure if he did this or I'm not sure. There's a Latin American military junta guy that they interview and the guy wants money from the British government and
00:31:23
Speaker
Tupper asks, Desa, well, so do you think that this guy, would he be willing to kill the current leader in order for the junta to succeed? Or does he still have some feelings of loyalty because he served in the military under this person? And Desa is a little bit unsure, but he knows that Tupper doesn't want to hear anything that's wishy-washy, no gray, you know, just like declarative, like,
00:31:53
Speaker
Yeah, he would, I know he would, or no way would he. I'd bet my life on it. It made me a little uneasy thinking, well, is this really the way the British and the US, for that matter, intelligence services really work? That they don't foster any ambiguity and they just want these people to just say an answer, any answer, but don't give me, I don't know.
Character Study: Peter Wheeler
00:32:23
Speaker
I hope not, but I think that probably is largely the case. Like a firm answer is better than shades of gray. And also, I mean, you can also see the seductive quality of that. I mean, it's playing into Deza's strengths and his gift and his skills, and it's giving him free license to really let them rip, right? He mentions early on that he can do this sort of thing. Before Wheeler really kind of puts a name to it, he's kind of reflecting on other aspects of his life.
00:32:51
Speaker
And that he doesn't do it with his wife, Louisa, that he knew that it would ruin the relationship if he were to be guessing everything that's gonna come next with her. But here, unfettered from that life, he's able to use his skills to their maximum. I mean, it's interesting.
00:33:12
Speaker
almost a polar opposite in terms of skill set in Thomas Nevenson who can't see but can become anyone and when given the ability to really go with that he does and he
00:33:28
Speaker
He even, in some ways, he becomes exactly what Cupra needs him to be, a perfectly flexible agent who can become anyone he needs to be elsewhere. But underlying that is a firm belief in country, as it were. There's an interesting linguistic
00:33:44
Speaker
back and forth when Tubera and Deza first meet. Tubera asks Deza what he does for a living and then about himself is very vague but says that he tries to employ his skills for the country because shouldn't one do that if one's able to. And Deza reflects on the idea of nation versus fatherland. Patria versus Pais, and I just reversed those. Patria would be fatherland, Pais would be nation.
00:34:10
Speaker
then this context, and I don't think quite clocks it at that moment, but Tupperay clearly views England as the fatherland, as the place that needs, almost demands a
00:34:23
Speaker
religious level of respect. I wanted to quickly point out one of the things that Maurice is so so good at on top of everything else is he has these he has these moments where he will just with a bit of dialogue really flesh out a character and so when at the end of the party at the party has ended and Wheeler is heading to bed and
00:34:49
Speaker
This is when Desat decides that he wants to be up later and read more because he wants to look into a few things. And so Desat says, I imagine you've got Orwell's homage to Catalonia and Thomas's history of the Spanish Civil War somewhere. I'd like to have a quick look at them. And we will respond with, almost everything about the Spanish Civil War is in there, in the study behind you, the West bookshelf. Then irritated, he said in his scolding tones, I imagine, he says, I imagine.
00:35:15
Speaker
Of course, I've got them. I am a Hispinist, remember? And although I've written about centuries of greater interest and momentum, the 20th century is still my period too, you know, the one I've lived through. And yours too, by the way. It just, this sort of prickly 80-year-old, you know, Oxford Don, who we find out
00:35:33
Speaker
has also been a spy, has been all sorts of things in his life. Just taking like minor offense to the suggestion that he might not have something that of course he should have, how dare you think otherwise. It just, I don't know. Wheeler is so generally calm and amiable that this sort of like little prickliness flaring up is really, I don't know. I could see people that I've known in my life, professors I've had, family members, like I could see that in that moment and it was just,
00:36:03
Speaker
just really great. I just really wanted to, I remember, I remember reading it the first time and loving that moment and reading it again. I'm like, Oh, yeah, don't be careful what you say to some folks because they can pick your words apart in a heartbeat, my friend.
00:36:18
Speaker
Well, two things about Wheeler. He comes off as very likable to me in this volume. And one of the things that I think is kind of extraordinary, on page 80 of the book, and this goes on for a entire page, is a description of Wheeler's eyes.
00:36:44
Speaker
Desit is describing Wheeler's eyes. You couldn't find a more detailed description of someone's eyes in the most juicy, romantic novel, how maybe someone looked into someone's eyes and fell in love. It's not at all goofy the way he does it, but it's just
00:37:05
Speaker
It's just incredible, the amount of detail, and it's really kind of striking for, here we are talking about the eyes of an 80 or a 90-year-old, and it goes on for an entire page. And then there's another, I think, thing that kind of contributes to the endearment that I think the reader can feel for Wheeler. And I think that Dezza also, I think he likes Wheeler a lot.
00:37:30
Speaker
But there's this notion of not letting go of their prey or not letting go of the point that they really want to come back to or know in the course of a conversation because Wheeler and Dezza and kind of all the characters in this book
00:37:52
Speaker
have very digressive conversations that will start somewhere and then just like go off. And I can't tell you how many times I had to go back. And it would seem like Wheeler then had stated a non sequitur in the course of the conversation. And it was like, oh, he's going back to the point that he started the conversation with
00:38:18
Speaker
16 pages ago and we're just now picking up picking up that point again now. So, um, but does it does make this comment about Wheeler, about how sharp Wheeler is and about how they could talk for hours, but they're going to get back to the point that Wheeler started to make at the beginning of the conversation eventually. Yeah. And, and does that even suggest that there's almost something generational or are,
00:38:45
Speaker
a little bit more old-fashioned about it, that he's the kind of person from the 20th century that always will get back to the point he wants to make, which I don't think I do. I think in these conversations, I read that and felt some criticism there because I feel like in these conversations, I go off on tangents and don't always land us back on the point that we were trying to make. I wasn't making a point. No, I don't think you were. I think Maurice was. I mean, Maurice was indicting us all in that moment, quite frankly.
00:39:29
Speaker
Another element I think that endears us to Wheeler is that he is older, and there's definitely a paternal quality to the relationship between Wheeler and Desa, made more so by the fact that Wheeler seems to be developing something of an aphasia as he's aging. He freezes up and is able to point or gesture, indicate what he wants, but the word won't come to him. The first time this comes up, it's he's asking for a cushion, but the word cushion just
00:39:59
Speaker
doesn't occur and it happens again towards the end of the novel. So there's also a demonstration of his frailty and of what time is doing to this really rather impressive, interesting person that certain things are inescapable.
Speech Consequences and Paranoia
00:40:21
Speaker
There's a quite long conversation at the end of the book between Wheeler and Dezza, and the point is made that the dead are without words, that they can't, they can no longer speak, they no longer have the ability
00:40:40
Speaker
to express themselves and that kind of does a recognizes that as as a sensitive point that Wheeler perhaps isn't just talking about
00:40:55
Speaker
about actual, you know, dead people, but that he's feeling, he's, he's feeling himself being maybe slowly dying, perhaps starting this process of like not being able to express himself. The only ones who do not share a common language, Jacobo, are the living and the dead.
00:41:16
Speaker
But talking about speaking, I think for me, the most fascinating part of this book is at the end, there's a lot of pictures of old-timey fashion posters. I didn't know anything about this campaign before I read this book the first time. But during World War II, there was this careless talk campaign that happened. And Wheeler really
00:41:44
Speaker
goes into quite some depth with Dezza about this campaign. And you get the sense that Wheeler had some kind of role in maybe, well, we know that he was in intelligence during World War II. But do you want to kind of get into that, Tom, in terms of
00:42:11
Speaker
what this campaign was and kind of how it might affect this book and maybe the two that are to come. So the campaign was based around the idea that Nazi agents or enemy provocateurs could be anywhere. And this is also built into, I think, something of the psychology of England.
00:42:34
Speaker
just as a physical byproduct of them being an island, that they could always be invaded, they're not that big, and that people are always going to try and find sneaky ways to get at them. The ocean is a barrier, so there are other means that are going to take place. And a certain kind of
00:42:53
Speaker
jingoism that I think, or isolationism that kind of kicks into them, especially around wartime. I can't be like this didn't happen during World War One, but there was a pretty strong exodus of Germans from England at the outbreak of World War One.
00:43:10
Speaker
my family, my dad's mom's family being one of them. Her father's butcher shop was burned down or something along those lines. But yeah, and then they end up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which
00:43:26
Speaker
whole other story. Anyway, but this campaign during World War II was based around the idea that there could be spies anywhere and that you must be careful with what you say and who you say it to. And that not just if you possess information, you shouldn't say it to anyone other than those who are authorized to say it to you, but that in a way, you kind of shouldn't talk to anyone because you may not even know that you have information that
00:43:52
Speaker
These enemy spies are clever and they're pulling together all this info and so if you say one thing about this happening over here and they heard something about that happening over there, they might put two and two together and know that something is coming. So it just creates this real sense of paranoia that
00:44:11
Speaker
In a way, it drives a wedge between citizens. You're really not supposed to go outside your group. In some ways, maybe even your group is suspect. Are you really sure you know everything about the other person? In terms of what the novel is doing, it's guessing what's going to happen next. How well do you actually know a person? Can you know for sure that
00:44:33
Speaker
the person that you're proclaiming your love to today that is reciprocating will feel the same tomorrow. Can you know that the person that you're allowed to share a secret about D-Day with won't the next day turn out to be a German spy? Are you sure that your grocer is safe? So it's this really
00:44:52
Speaker
interesting examination of that kind of paranoia and a security state, which they then pull up to for when the novel is written, the modern day with, we were talking about what Tupra has mentioned to him may be coming in the wake of what he calls the Twin Towers Massacre. A lot of what we now live with, what we've
00:45:18
Speaker
found out over the years in terms of NSA spying and the like. So there's an interesting paranoia that's being woven into
00:45:30
Speaker
the British fabric during the war. And these posters are fantastic. An image of two women sitting on a train talking to each other. Two rows behind them are clearly supposed to be German officers. And underneath it says, you never know who's listening. Careless talk costs lives. And careless talk costs lives is the catchphrase for all of this.
00:45:59
Speaker
A few, another one, a few careless words may end in this and it shows a ship sinking. So yeah, like some very vivid imagery to strike home. Maybe put your head down and don't talk.
00:46:12
Speaker
Yeah, Wheeler collects these posters and he shows them to Dezza and many of them are included in the book. It is, they are fascinating because the
00:46:29
Speaker
They look so rudimentary, I think, to our eyes because the caricatures are so blatant. You can clearly see who's supposed to be the person in these posters that shouldn't be trusted.
00:46:47
Speaker
the villain, so to speak. But I also think that Wheeler makes a really interesting point that this campaign during World War II kind of had some really unintended consequences. And one of the things that it did was
00:47:06
Speaker
It kind of made a lot of people think that maybe they did have information, that maybe they were important, and it caused them to just blab even more than they normally would, just to talk to everyone about everything they knew all the time.
00:47:27
Speaker
For a certain type of person, it kind of bolstered their ego a little bit, to be at a gathering and just talking a lot and having those loose lips, I guess, that supposedly sink ships and everyone else at the party kind of looking and like, wow, that guy seems to know a lot or he's saying a lot and he must be somewhat important or must be in the know.
00:47:54
Speaker
Yeah, it was a really fascinating, I think, a study that Desa and Wheeler do of that whole kind of campaign and how it worked and didn't work.
00:48:05
Speaker
It's interesting of course, right? Like I'm sure that the posters while rudimentary got their point across very, very clearly and certainly instilled a certain sense of that. But then they of course have the contrary effect as you're describing. And I think, I don't know, while you were talking about that, it made me think of actually like making everything top secret in the US government. That's such a huge problem today that almost any memo can be like stamped with that no matter what it contains or
00:48:35
Speaker
who sent it. I mean, there's something like, what is it a million and a half people who have top secret, various levels of top secret clearance in the United States. And they make something like 10 million documents a year at this point tops. It's just, it's just utter madness. And most of it is just chatter. Like none of it's none of it's that important. I was a very small percentage of it is. Yeah. If Maria's had fast forward himself a bit more to talk
00:49:04
Speaker
Maybe he never would have wanted to, but talk about the social media age, where everyone is talking all the time about everything they think is so important, despite most of it being the same thing and despite most of it being ultimately meaningless to anyone other than you. Yeah, I don't think he would have thought very highly or probably didn't think very highly of this period in human talking.
00:49:27
Speaker
But it does also speak to the consequences of speech, which is how he opens the novel. As usual, he has one of his
00:49:38
Speaker
his banger openings that just, he immediately contradicts by the very existence of the opening, but one should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed or trod on the earth or traverse the world or who, having done so, are now almost safe and uncertain when I'm oblivion. So you should never talk, but get ready for 1200 plus pages of me talking all about this.
00:50:07
Speaker
Talking about not talking. There is at the end of this volume, when Wheeler and Desert are talking about this careless talk campaign during World War II, that Wheeler mentions his wife a bit, and the fact that she died during World War II, but we don't get a lot of details.
00:50:34
Speaker
And I'm wondering whether that, do you think that serves as a cliffhanger of sorts, Tom, in terms of maybe we'll learn more about what happened to her in the next volumes? So just like a quick note, I've read all three, Lori is about to crash her way through the next two. So we're trying to be, I'm trying to be very careful about
00:50:59
Speaker
what comes up next. So we're just going to pass over that question in silence. Okay. All right. Tom is refusing to answer and I respect that refusal. I do want to talk a little bit about the subtitle. All of these volumes of Your Face Tomorrow have a subtitle and this one is Fever and Spear. So why do you think that is the
00:51:26
Speaker
The subtitle, there's numerous references to fever and Wheeler's cane. He's hoarding his cane a little bit like a spear sometimes. Umbrellas being held like a spear. Those two words together and how they relate to the book remain a bit ambiguous to me.
Symbolism and Themes in 'Fever and Spear'
00:51:50
Speaker
I will say that they remain a bit ambiguous to me too, even after all these years.
00:51:57
Speaker
I do think the fever portion perhaps is, I mean, I think in some respects it's Deza becoming infected on a certain level with what his gift allows for.
00:52:08
Speaker
And then the spear being like it put into action. I mean, that also is part of what's taking place here and that, and that he kind of talks about a little bit, um, is that he's saying all these things and he never knows what the outcome is, but he's saying all these things with such abandoned and making such affirmative statements about what's going to happen next pertaining and not just like as in the case of the, uh, uh,
00:52:34
Speaker
the Venezuelan officer who may or may not be planning a coup, which we later find out may have been connected to an attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez, but of all sorts of like private individuals even. And he's saying some pretty decisive things and clearly there's an outcome to it. He doesn't see the outcome, he doesn't get to know what the outcome is, but clearly there is something that happens next from his reports. So I
00:53:02
Speaker
I kind of wonder if that's what he's kind of getting at in that respect. I don't know, I might do a little bit more deep diving or digging on some of the references that are coming out of this one. Because also the only real, the only terribly substantial that I ever pick up on, literally referencing this one is to Rilke and the Dueno elegies. But that's more the reflection on death. I don't know, what did you take from Fever and Spear?
00:53:30
Speaker
Yeah, it was confusing to me. I thought maybe that night at Wheeler's, it seems like Des has kind of been a fever, you know, he's like, he can't, he doesn't want to sleep. He's just kind of trying to figure out, you know.
00:53:45
Speaker
how was Wheeler involved in the in the Spanish Civil War and he gets kind of in a fevered state. I will say I mentioned the the spear and references to to an umbrella so Dezza being London is walking you know between his
00:54:05
Speaker
his flat and the nondescript office where Chupra does his thing.
Complexity of Personal Lives
00:54:13
Speaker
A couple evenings, you know, at different times that we learn about and he gets this distinct feeling that, you know, someone is following him. He hears footsteps. Every time he turns around, he just sees a woman walking a dog and, you know, it all seems, you know, quite
00:54:35
Speaker
quite innocent enough. But then, and again, I don't want to spoil anything, but this woman with the dog shows up kind of at the end of this volume and we learn that he actually knows this woman. So I don't know whether that the umbrella is a symbol of something that was like
00:54:59
Speaker
covering and now revealed. I don't know. I don't know where to go with this. But yeah, it's just always, it remains ambiguous to me. Yeah, very much so. And to me, imagine also when these came out, I mean, I grabbed this one and read it immediately.
00:55:21
Speaker
And then the next one is dance and dream. And I'm like, well, what the hell does that mean? What is coming? What is coming? What are we going to be doing next?
00:55:32
Speaker
There is, speaking of dance, and I don't want to, I feel like maybe I'm just jumping all over the place here, but there is a really interesting recurring thing here where Desa's neighbor, who we can see in the building across the street from him, when the guy's got his, maybe the guy doesn't even have drapes or shades, I don't know, but this guy dances.
00:56:01
Speaker
He dances by himself a lot. Sometimes he has friends that come over and dance with him. He doesn't can't hear the songs that they're dancing to, but he can kind of intuit just based upon what type of dancing is being done.
00:56:16
Speaker
But it is kind of interesting that Desa is very fascinated with this guy and is always watching him. And he remarks that this guy feels like his biggest challenge because he just cannot interpret or understand this guy who's probably not doing anything but having a good time and just living
00:56:40
Speaker
a carefree moment at the end of his workday, but he's just impenetrable to Desa. That's interesting. That's a really good way of looking at it. Because when Desa does his work, when they all do their work, because we also hear from some of the other members of the team weighing in, they're making these declarative statements, but they're like,
00:57:02
Speaker
They're really reflecting on major decisions or choices that the person that they're examining might make or take. They're not going into the quiet moments in someone's life. They're not guessing that this person might like bonsai, you know, that this person might be like an absolute...
00:57:23
Speaker
is a buttoned up businessman during the day and a total metalhead at night. They're not going into those things. They're painting with very broad strokes. And not to say that they're not correct, largely, or accurate, but they're really reducing what other people are in this process.
00:57:47
Speaker
in kind of in much the same way that like that campaign was reducing your fellow citizens into potential spies, which I think is also
00:57:56
Speaker
why Wheeler's sort of background is so interesting and why it's so full here. I mean, I think you got, in some ways, a full-life tale. I mean, but with lots of things left out, like the fate of Val, Wheeler's wife. But, I mean, one of the things that you find out from Wheeler is that his last name was originally Rylands, and that Toby Rylands, Dezza's original
00:58:25
Speaker
contact mentor at Oxford is his brother and that their parents got divorced and Wheeler is their mother's maiden name and Peter went with that. Toby rejected it and went and lived with their father and they were separated and rejoined as grown men. But these
00:58:48
Speaker
these two men who had been so critical and important in that compartment of Dezza's life, he'd never known that they were brothers. I mean, they even lived next door to each other in Oxford.
00:59:02
Speaker
Yeah. And speaking of like, they seem like very, very quintessentially British. They both, you know, they both were professors at Oxford. They both served MI6 or MI5 or, you know, fought for the Brits in World War II, you know, in some type of
00:59:25
Speaker
of intelligence gathering capacity, but they were born in New Zealand. So they're not even British nationals. Right. And I mean, when Wheeler is suggesting to Deza to come to the party, he goes into this long thing about Tupra's name and how weird it is. And it made me immediately think of Thomas Nevinson, but then also Deza's first name is Jacques. That's not a standard Spanish name.
00:59:53
Speaker
So he's constantly playing Marius with these notions of identity and almost cross-nationality in some respects. I mean, in one of our first episodes, you brought up the Englishness perhaps of Javier Marius in terms of how he writes and what his considerations are. So yeah, it's quite interesting and quite interesting how like those elements
01:00:17
Speaker
kind of tie back into, I think that kind of ties back into your point about the dancing man across the way that people contain multitudes and are comprised of so many different, very strange influences and
01:00:35
Speaker
Yeah, you might be able to guess what they'll do when presented with a gun and someone holding a knife to someone you care about, but will you really know who they are on a certain level, which also ties into the conversations he has with his father about the denunciation.
Anticipation for 'Dance and Dream'
01:00:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. It's the combination of the unknowableness of other people, but the constant incessant need to know and to understand and to pry back that lid ever so much more.
01:01:10
Speaker
Well, I'm really looking forward to continuing the conversation on volume two of Your Face Tomorrow. I think it's going to be fun, and everyone that I know that's read all three of these just keeps talking about how each one gets progressively better. I love the first one, so I'm really looking forward to it. I know you will not be disappointed. I also think we should both
01:01:36
Speaker
be ready to talk about our favorite dance songs and some of our most recent dreams when we get into it. Okay. It has nothing to do with the novel, but just because of the name. Sounds good. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Lori.