Tomás Nevinson

A novel

By: Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa - translator

Narrated by: Ben Cura

Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2021 Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

“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

An assassin's dilemma

Tómas Nevinson was the last novel by Javier Marías, one of Spain’s best authors until he passed away recently. It was a fine novel to help cement his legacy. This novel explores the psyche of an aging spy, Tómas Nevinson, half-Spanish, half-English, who can’t leave the business. He comes back to M16, which is exchanging favors with Spanish functionaries, to identify and assassinate an alleged Basque ETA terrorist who’s half-Irish and half-Spanish and has committed mass murder in Spain, and has a connection to the IRA. There are three women candidates and Nevinson struggles with the idea that he must kill one of them once he’s sure of his target. And that’s the crux of the problem. He can’t be sure, yet one of them, who’s been hiding for years in a benign role—restaurant owner, schoolteacher, suffering wife—is a monster. Nevinson poses the question to all of us. Given the chance, do you kill a monster? Do you have what it takes to assassinate someone in cold blood? Nevinson has killed before in self-defense. This is different. What if you fail to kill the monster, and the monster goes on killing? Nevinson muses on two stories, one fictional (a film), one real, where a man had a clear opportunity to assassinate Hitler before he launched his murderous assault on humanity. Can you live with yourself after not killing that subhuman person, in cold-blood or not? This is not your usual spy thriller story. Well-read by Ben Cura.

Beautifully written and excellent narration

Even though this book is beautifully written, it is excruciatingly repetitive. The author doesn't have any faith that the reader can remember anything so he repeats over and over again the same images. His style to twist the image slightly to expose the similarity between each new event doesn't work well in English.

Verbose

This was too slow with too much shallow philosophizing. I gave up in chapter three. There was a lot of hinting around at mysterious doings but I felt this book never got started.