Javier Marías, Spanish Nobel contender, is in the process of creating a literary character who has a shot at immortality. In America, Mr. Marías has a permanently imminent reputation: He’s been the next W.G. Sebald for a little too long.But whatever the readiness of American readers, Mr. Marías’s creation, Jacques Deza, is good to go.

Deza lives in London, where he has fallen in with the most interesting spy ring in the world. This crack team, a branch of MI6, simply interprets individuals.They interview a foreign minister or an MP and write a report that sketches the individual’s character in broad terms. Can this individual be trusted? Could this individual kill?

It’s almost frightening to imagine what he must know … He makes no use of his knowledge, it’s very odd. But he has it. And if he did one day make use of it, he would be someone to be feared. He’d be pretty unforgiving, I think.

So runs Deza’s own dossier, which he stumbles upon in the office one day. Deza, like his teammates, has a preternatural ability to see through other people. But there’s something off about Deza’s ability: “He knows he doesn’t understand himself and that he never will. And so he doesn’t waste his time trying to do so. I don’t think he’s dangerous. But he is to be feared.”

Deza belongs to the tradition of modernist literary characters (think “The Man Without Qualities”) who look at the world with a warped genius.But Mr. Marías appeals to a newer and more mainstream sensibility: After all, Deza’s in the business of intrigue, and his catalog of interests — swords, patrimony, death, the Spanish Civil War, linguistics — give his story the air of a fantasy adventure novel. Indeed, the very mechanism of his organization, the hyperconfident analysis of individuals, makes this book a maelstrom of literary pleasure. After all, people in grown-up novels are always urgently trying to understand each other. Mr. Marías puts this adult play at the center of his boyish drama.

“Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two: Dance and Dream” (New Directions, 288 pages, $24.95) continues the story from last year’s volume, “Fever and Spear.” In that book, Deza, a middleaged madrileño who loves Henry Mancini, found himself in London, having left his wife for unexplained reasons. While working as a translator at the BBC, Deza hears from an old Oxonian friend — in a previous but separate novel by Mr. Marías, “All Souls,” Deza lectured at Oxford. Sir Peter Wheeler invites Deza to an unusual dinner, featuring a nondescript but strangely magnetic man named Bertrand Tupra. After dinner, Sir Peter quizzes Deza about Tupra, both testing his powers of observation and, implicitly introducing him to his new boss. By the novel’s end, Deza is working for Tupra.

“Dance and Dream” complicates Deza’s relationship with Tupra. The second half of the novel takes place in a handicapped bathroom, where Deza watches Tupra thrash a seemingly harmless man. Meanwhile, Deza’s narration, conducted at a two-day remove, while Deza’s failure to intervene still smarts, meditates on the Spanish Civil War, which killed his uncle and almost ruined his father.

Will Deza be judged for his actions? “When you’re alone and living abroad and ceaselessly speaking a language not your own or not your first language,” are you as responsible for yourself as you would be at home? And because all feelings pass, do they ever count in the first place? “It is amazing and also irritating how cessation brings with it a kind of false, momentary cancellation of what has happened. … Now that it isn’t burning any more, it’s almost as if it had never burned.”

And if, as fiction for example proves, “life is not recountable,” is final judgment possible? Is “the Judge” taking so long to arrive because “he does not dare to confront such a vast, querulous or possibly offended or, even worse, mocking multitude”? Without a judge, could the dead at least speak to the dead, “martyr and executioner or instigator and victim,” would they know what they wanted to say; would they even, for all eternity, be able to trust their memories, or continue to believe their own words?

For example, Deza remembers his father, who refused to confront the man who betrayed him under Franco. “It would have given [the culprit] a sort a posteriori justification, a false validation, an anachronistic motive for his action,” his father explains.

Musing like this would seem unreal or morbid for some. But the mystery — the meat — of Mr. Marías’s fiction lies in a countervailing impression, an impression that Deza’s cogitations are the responsible ruminations of an experienced man. It is as if fantasy had been made legal, fantasy of a grand, destiny-oriented kind. Deza is deferential to the next thought, rather than indulgent of it.

At the back of Deza’s thinking lies a mantra learned from both his father and from Tupra. Both men have trained him always to ask, “What else?” In Tupra’s case, “What else?” leads you deeper into a question, past hesitation, toward any actionable conclusion. The rule-breaking authority of the state gives Tupra a corresponding intellectual violence. But in the experience of Deza’s father, “What else?” leads you away, away from violence and even from denunciations. Deza wavers between these examples, half-realizing that both his father and Tupra seem not to believe in any unitary sense of personal responsibility.Deza’s job requires positive statements; it requires him to see through people, “without qualms.” But in this volume he is beginning to clash with Tupra. Indeed, that mantra “What else?” even threatens to prevent the conclusion of the “Your Face Tomorrow” series, which was meant to be a two-volume series but will now require three, or more, volumes. Start reading it now.

blytal@nysun.com