Geting a little frustrated w/ Marias's Your Face Tomorrow vol 1

Finished the first half (Fever) of Javiar Marias's 3-volume novel Your Face Tomorrow (vol. 1, 2002) and remain intrigued but puzzled. Much of this section involves the account by the narrator (Jacques/Jaime Deza) of his father's imprisonment after the Spanish Civil War, betrayed by one of his best friends who jumped over to the side of Franco and of his mother's search for information about her brother who was executed without trial shortly after the war. While these are important aspects of the narrator's family history and his life, it's not clear to me what these incidents have to do w/ his stay at the home of his mentor, Peter Wheeler, and his long night of research into Wheeler's collection on the Spanish war. I can't see that he discovered anything about his family from his research, but maybe I missed something. So far, there are hints and indications that Deza is a spy and is about to undertake an espionage assignment from Wheeler, who is perhaps a master spy with the cover of an academic post at Oxford. But all this is by hint and insinuation; I'm going to keep reading, as maybe more will become clear in the second part (Spear) of this volume, but if not I doubt I'll go forward into volume 2. There's lots of fine writing here and perhaps the rudiments of a plot, but at some point the story line has to get some forward motion.