Why I won't read volume 2 of Your Face Tomorrow

Having finished reading volume 1 (Fever and Spear, 2002, Margaret Jull Costa, translator - and it does appear to be a good translation as far as I can tell) of Javier Marais's trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow, I can only say that seldom (never) has such fine writing and sugh fascinating info (about the international espionage business) put to waste by such a lame excuse for a plot. Readers of this blog will know that I'm by no means a Philistine and am interested in experimental writing and narrative risks and innovations and also that I'm open to reading multi-volume works (e.g. Knausgaard, Proust), but this one pushed me to my limit. After a terrific start in which we see how the narrator, a middle-aged, recently divorced/separated Spaniard living in London, gets recruited through a mentor into British intelligence, the qualities expected of an intelligence officer (completely different from the James Bond heroics that Marias gently mocks), and the political background (WWII, the Spanish Civil War) that could drive a man or woman into the espionage business, even when they know that some of their work will cost sometimes-innocent people their lives. All well and good, but Marias makes these points early on and then dwells on them, again and again, so that by the final chapter I felt I could just skim, I'd read all of this before. There are alluring hints of a developing plot - will the narrator, Deza, get involved deeply in a dubious case, will he learn more about turncoats and betrayals in Spain who killed his uncle and who led to his father's imprisonment, will a relationship develop w/ one of the young women working on his team, will he learn something about the woman w/ a dog who seems to be following him (through a rainstorm) as he walks home from the office without a name, as he calls it? No, no, and no. After 380 pp., nothing has actually happened to the narrator - though we sure get a lot of discussion and pontificating, esp. by his Oxford-donnish mentor, Wheeler. But there's nothing at this point that will make me want to read volume 2. I really liked one of Marias's other novels (The Infatuations), so will probably read his next work to appear in English, but am passing on Face Tomorrow volume 2.