Tomás Nevinson

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The final novel from Spain’s most acclaimed writer, a novel about a charismatic half-Spanish, half-English man who is recruited by British intelligence • “Marías’s best work.” —El País

“Compelling, hypnotic, and exciting at the same time.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Retired spy Tomás Nevinson—once an agent for the British Secret Service, now living a quiet life in his hometown, Madrid—is approached by his former handler, Bertram Tupra, with an offer to bring him back in from the cold for one last assignment.

The mission: to go undercover again, in a small Spanish town, to find out which of three women who moved there a decade ago is in fact a terrorist trained by the IRA, on the run after masterminding several deadly attacks.

Everything about the assignment is shadowy, from exactly who is in charge, to the question of what “justice” Nevinson will need to mete out once he unmasks the terrorist. But, lured by the appeal of being back on the inside, he accepts the job.

Nevinson soon becomes intimately involved with each of the three women. How—or whom—to choose among them? Under increasing pressure, he must choose, and then act . . .

Charting a world in which right and wrong, good and evil, are irreparably blurred, Javier Marías takes us on a journey of rare and unforgettable suspense in this, the final novel written before his untimely passing.Praise for Tomás Nevinson
“A page-turner . . . Marías is a great philosophical novelist, one of the greatest European novelists of the last 50 years. His characters brood obsessively, and one of Marías’s great skills as a novelist is to make that brooding completely compelling, hypnotic, and exciting.” —William Flesch, Los Angeles Review of Books

“An ingenious premise . . . Marías plays deliberately and unsettlingly with the appearance of real and terrible events in the middle of a novel that owes such an obvious debt to the pleasures of genre . . . In one of Nevinson’s conversations with the socialist wife, they ‘agreed that really good authors—who, according to her, were getting fewer in number—managed “magically” (her rather affected word) to make us believe their stories and passionately engage with them’ . . . This, of course, is a very good description of Marías himself, who died last year from Covid complications. Which means that number has become even smaller.” —Benjamin Markovits, New York Times Book Review

“Engrossing . . . No-one nowadays writes prose like Javier Marías . . . In Tomás Nevinson, Marías demonstrates why so many of his peers believe him to be among the greatest of contemporary novelists. Like a secret agent, he is an observer and an eavesdropper, and an inventor. If you’re already a fan, you’ll know what to expect and rejoice. If you’re not, what a treat you have in store.” —Rosemary Goring, Herald Scotland

“A stimulating drama by a master of his craft.” —The Economist
 
“Magnificently evocative . . . The style is Sebald meets John le Carré.” —Jeremy Cliffe, New Statesman
 
“With his perennial theme of secrecy and betrayal, Marías has left us a towering work, a rightful culmination testifying to his genius.” —Richard Cho, The Rumpus

“His writing is often thrilling in a way that’s distinct from any other author I know . . . His novels come to us in stunning translations by Margaret Jull Costa . . . Reading him can become an addiction . . . Once you’ve been inside Marías’s world, to spend too long outside is unbearable.” —Chris Power, Sunday Times (U.K.)
 
“Comparisons to Proust and Henry James come up a lot when critics discuss Marías, but we could also see his style, his performance, as something akin to a too-late Balzac, aided perhaps by a disciple of the Ancient Mariner . . . The only other novel I know that works in this way is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.” —Michael Wood, London Review of Books

“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 [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 . . . [Spymaster Bertram Tupra is] one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction . . . What really makes his novels enthralling is the irresistible ruminative, allusive narrative voice . . . A new Marías book is always an exhilarating pleasure and one I’ll miss dreadfully.” —Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph

“One of the most acclaimed Spanish authors of his generation, Marías has always been interested in the spaces between genres . . . a writer who loves the propulsiveness of the thriller, the page-turning compulsion that drives a reader through Eric Ambler or John le Carré . . . Tomás Nevinson is brilliant on the daily vexations of the spy’s life . . . There’s always a profound interest in the human condition in Marías, the sense of an author who uses the tools of postmodernism to ask deep questions about the way we engage with each other and perceive ourselves. For Marías, much like Marilynne Robinson or J.M. Coetzee, the novel is a vital and powerful vehicle for philosophical inquiry . . . With Tomás Nevinson, we are left with a great last novel by which to remember him.” —Alex Preston, Financial Times

“Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose, flawlessly translated by Margaret Jull Costa . . . This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music by Philip Glass . . . A many-layered meditation on mortality and memory and free will and its opposite.” —Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Guardian

“Seductively conversational and glinting with slantwise humour . . . It’s serious stuff but there’s room for lightness as well . . . Inescapably poignant . . . Keep them coming, you think, knowing there’s no more left.” —Anthony Cummins, The Observer

“Marías is a stylist of rare stature.” —Gustav Jonsson, Washington Examiner

“It may well be that Tomás Nevinson is Javier Marías’s best work” —José-Carlos Mainer, El País

“Tomás Nevinson is brilliant proof of Marías’s elegance and literary gifts, such that it stands with his most important books. It is his definitive work.” —Karina Sainz Borgo, Voz Populi

“It’s impossible to decide if this is his best novel—there are so many that could be considered his best. It is, in any case, one of those that will appeal most to readers, for its narrative tension.” —Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia

“As accessible as an Agatha Christie Miss Marple mystery, or a John le Carré novel.” —Francesc Miró, El Diario

“I haven’t tired of the novel for a single moment . . . Not for nothing is Marías considered one of the greatest storytellers in all of Europe.” —Paco Huelva, Todo Literatura

“Extraordinary.” —Nadal Suau, El Cultural

“Whenever I read Marías I have the sensation that I’m listening to a symphony.” —Julia Navarro, Hoy por Hoy Valladolid (Cadena Ser radio)

“A powerful story with a giant pulse . . . Amazing.” —Antonio Lucas, El Mundo

“Marías writes, as always, like no one else . . . because he is up to something else: to elevate us, to do for us—why not?—what Shakespeare did for his time and for the people of his time.” —Alberto Olmos, El Confidencial

“Essential . . . Marías unfolds an entire narrative universe to offer us a great, ambitious novel of profound reflection.” —Javier García Recio, La Opinión de Málaga

“It bears repeating: a colossal novel.” —Guillermo Rodríguez, El HuffPost

“I would like to be in the shoes of someone who has not yet read the latest novel by Javier Marías and is waiting for it in a bookstore. What a feast is in store for you.” —José Carlos Llop, The ObjectiveJAVIER MARÍAS was born in Madrid in 1951. He has published fifteen novels, including The Infatuations and A Heart So White, as well as three collections of short stories and several volumes of essays. His work has been translated into forty-four languages, has sold nine million copies worldwide, and has won a dazzling array of international literary awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Étranger. He died in 2022.
Translated by Margaret Jull CostaI was brought up the old-fashioned way, and could never have dreamed that I would one day be ordered to kill a woman. You don’t touch women, you don’t beat them, you don’t do them any physical harm and you avoid all verbal violence, although in that regard they themselves don’t always hold back. More than that, you protect and respect them and give way to them, shield them and help them if they’re pregnant or with a child in their arms or in a pushchair, you offer them your seat on the bus or in the metro, you even safeguard them when walking down the street, keeping them away from the traffic or from the effluvia that, in the olden days, used to be tossed over balconies, and if a ship founders and seems likely to go under, the lifeboats are for them and their little ones (who belong more to them than to us men), at least the first spaces. When a group of people are about to be shot en masse, the women are sometimes spared and allowed to leave; they are then left without husbands,without fathers, without brothers and even without adolescent let alone grown-up sons, but they are allowed to go on living, mad with grief like tormented ghosts, for whom, nevertheless, the years pass and thus they grow old, chained to the memory of the world they have lost. They are obliged to become the depositories of memory, the only ones left when it seems no one is left, and the only ones who can tell what happened.

Anyway, this is what I was taught as a child, but that was then, and it wasn’t always followed to the letter. Yes, that was then and was applied in theory but not in practice. After all, in 1793, a queen of France was guillotined, and before that, countless women accused of witchcraft were burned to death, as was the soldier Joan of Arc, to give just a couple of well-known examples.

Yes, of course, women have always been killed, but it’s something that goes against the grain and causes great unease, it isn’t clear whether Anne Boleyn was given the privilege of being put to the sword rather than beheaded with a crude, bungling axe, or indeed burned at the stake, because she was a woman or because she was the Queen, or because she was young and beautiful, beautiful according to the tastes of the time and according to reports, although reports are never to be trusted, not even those of eyewitnesses, who see and hear only vaguely, and who are often wrong or else lie. In engravings of her execution she is shown on her knees as if she were praying, her body erect and her head held high; if they had used an axe, she would have had to rest her chin or cheek on the block and adopt a more humiliating, more uncomfortable posture, to have grovelled if you like, and this would also have offered a clearer view of her backside to those who could see it from where they were standing. It’s odd that she should be so concerned about comfort or composure in her final moments in this world, and even about elegance and decorum; of what possible importance could this be to someone who was about to become a corpse and disappear beneath the earth, and in two separate pieces. These depictions also include the swordsman of Calais, as he is called in various accounts, so as to distinguish him from any ordi-nary executioner—brought over ex profeso because of his great skill and, possibly, at the request of the Queen herself—and he is always shown standing behind her and out of sight, never in front of her, as if it had been agreed and decided that she would be spared having to see the coming blow, the trajectory of the heavy weapon which, nevertheless, advances swiftly and unstoppably, like a whistle once it has left the lips or like a sudden strong gust of wind (in a couple of  the images she has her eyes blindfolded, but not in most of them); so that she would not know the precise moment when her head would be cut off with a single clean two-handed blow and fall onto the dais face up or face down or on one side, on the neck or the top of the head—who knows, she certainly would never know; so that the movement would catch her by surprise, if there can be any surprise when the person knows why she has come and why she is kneeling there, without a cloak about her, at eight o’clock in the morning on a still-cold English day in May. She is, of course, kneeling to facilitate the executioner’s task and not call into question his skill: he had been so good as to cross the Channel and offer his help, and he probably wasn’t particularly tall. It seems Anne Boleyn had insisted that one blow with the sword would be enough because she only had a little neck. She must often have put her hands about it as proof.

She was, at any rate, treated more considerately than Marie Antoinette two and a half centuries later, for it is said that she was treated far worse in her October than her husband Louis XVI in his January, for he had preceded her to the guillotine by about nine months. The fact that she was a woman was of no interest to the revolutionaries, or perhaps they considered treating women differently to be in itself anti-revolutionary. A lieutenant called de Busne, who had treated her respectfully during her time in prison, was arrested and replaced by another, surlier guard. When it came to the King, they had simply tied his hands behind his back when he reached the foot of the scaffold; he had been transported there in a closed carriage, which belonged, I believe, to the mayor of Paris; and he was allowed to choose the priest who attended him (a nonjuring priest, that is, one who had not sworn loyalty to the Constitution and to the new order, which changed on a daily basis and which had condemned the King to die). His Austrian widow, however, had her hands bound before the journey, which she had to make in an open cart, thus leaving her far more vulnerable and exposed to the unbridled loathing on the faces of the rabble and to their insults; also they only offered her the services of a constitutional priest, which she politely declined. The chronicles say that although, during her reign, she had been said to be lacking in manners, these returned to her in her final moments: she went up the steps to the scaffold so quickly that she stumbled and trod on the executioner’s foot, for which she immediately apologized, as if this were her usual response (‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur,’ she said).

The guillotine had its inevitably undignified preliminaries: the condemned man not only had his hands tied behind his back, he would also have his arms tightly bound to his sides, like a foreshadowing of the shroud; once rendered rigid and ungainly, almost immobilized, two assistants would have to pick him up like a parcel (or as they used to do with dwarfs in circuses before firing them from a cannon) and manoeuvre him into position, face down, prone, completely horizontal, so that his neck fitted in the designated space. In that, Marie Antoinette and husband were equals: they both found themselves objectified at the end, treated like sacks or bales of cotton or torpedoes in some archaic submarine, like bundles with a protruding head that would suddenly tumble off in no particular direction, until someone stopped it by grabbing the hair in full view of the crowd. Not one of them did what St Denis did, according to an astonished French cardinal, who described how, after St Denis’ martyrdom and decapitation during Emperor Valerian’s persecution of Christians, the saint-to-be picked up his head and walked with it under his arm from Montmartre to the place of his burial (thus considerately lightening the porters’ load), where the abbey or church that bears his name was later built: a distance of five and a half miles. This marvel left the cardinal speechless, he said, although actually it so fired him up that a witty lady listening to his account interrupted him, cutting the incident down to size with a single sentence: ‘But, sir!’ she said. ‘The distance is nothing, it’s only the first step that is difficult.’US

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