Why I'm getting frustrated with Your Face Tomorrow

I have to say that at this point, nearly finished reading the first volume of Javiar Marias's Your Face Tomorrow, I'm getting frustrated by and disappointed in this novel. What started off w/ so much promise - an intelligent, middle-aged man living in England and recruited initially as a Spanish-language interpreter for British intelligence and who gradually gets more deeply involved with intelligence work, specifically, interviewing potential partners or antagonists, has by page 320 or so not moved much beyond chapter one. JM well established the point that much of the work is drudgery, that it always involves surveillance and mutual suspicion on the part of all parties, that no one single person has knowledge about every facet of any operation, that its difficult even impossible to tell who might be a colleague, a plant, a spy, a threat. All a great setup, but something has to happen, some vestige of a plot, by this point. The chapters I read last night are about the wartime public-relations campaigns urging people not to speak about what they know about war efforts (a similar campaign in the U.S. during WWII was "Loose lips sink ships). The narrator's (Deza's) mentor, Wheeler has saved various posters and flyers about wartime surveillance, and some are reprinted in this book; the key point is that Wheeler thinks these campaigns inevitably fail because - as he explains over many pages - people like to talk. This is a fine insight, and JM expresses it very well through Wheeler's near-monologue - but so far this entire volume has been about threats, atmosphere, an overall sense of dread and paranoia, but nothing really happens, at least in the sense of a traditional plot. Is this enough to keep readers going for two more volumes. Though I will finish reading volume one, the answer is: Not for me. As someone wisely said in a writer's group that I used to belong to: Readers like plot.