Marias's signature novel, Your Face Tomorrow, off to a deliberate pace - thoughtful?, or too slow?

No doubt that Javier Marias's signature novel(s) - the trilogy Your Face Tomorrow, which begins with the volume Fever and Spear (2002) - will be a challenge, but one to which I'm willing to accept (at least up to a point!). Marias is hot suddenly - see the current profile in the NYTmagazine, an advance push for his forthcoming novel and a hint that JM may be (over)due for a Nobel Prize - and I've read a some of his previous work, as you can see in the index to this blog; I particularly liked his novel The Infatuations, but was less than taken by some of his other work. Fever and Spear gets off to a slow start, though shows obvious signs of a developing plot and an intelligent narration; the protagonist/narrator, a Spaniard living in England, indicates - but always by indirection, which is Marias's way - that he is involved in some form of espionage, though exactly whom he works for or what he does to gather information, is left, at least at this point (ca 40 pp/10% into the novel) mysterious and uncertain; it's a narration that proceeds by hints and obliquity. We also get some information about the narrator's broken marriage; he tries to communicate by phone w/ his ex or estranged with and to get information about the well-being of their children, but he feels remote from them (they live in Madrid) and guilty about their estrangement. In short, at that point the novel gives promise of becoming a solid adventure/espionage story - though not nearly as accessible and plot driven as, say Le Carre - as well as a story of domestic sorrow and midlife crisis. Marias is working on a vast canvas here - more than a 1,000 pp. over the course of the 3 volumes - so he's in no rush in establishing the arc of his story; whether than pace is too slow and meandering for this sometimes impatient reader is something that I'll figure out over the next few days of reading.