Francis King

Set in 2020, this has been described as a work of ‘futuristic’ fiction. Most such fiction — Forster’s The Machine Stops, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice — describes a world radically different from the one familiar to people at the time when it was written. However, in The Eagle’s Throne the fact that Condoleezza Rice is the first black female president of the United States is about all that differentiates Fuentes’ satiric vision of the political world of the future from the actual one today. May it not be that, in setting the date of his story 14 years ahead, he merely wished to avoid the charge that he was pillorying real-life people?

Although writers in languages of lesser currency suffer a cruel disadvantage when striving to establish themselves on the international scene, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare has succeeded in leaping that hurdle by the extraordinary athleticism of his writing. Translations of his novels have appeared in more than 40 countries, and in recent times he has been annually tipped as a possible Nobel Prize winner. Shamefully and typically, only his recent winning of the first Man Booker International Prize has caused him at last to be adequately acknowledged in this country.

From her earliest years, one attribute dominated Bernice Rubens’s life: passion. It fuelled her impressive books, her personal relationships and her reactions to the world around her. It expressed her innate generosity of spirit, but could also deprive her of the ability to consider any viewpoint contrary to her own. Of such passion there is little in this posthumously published memoir. Instead, the general tone is one of valedictory tenderness. Rubens writes far more about a close-knit and much-loved clan than about her successes, first as a maker of documentary films and then as the author of 25 novels, one of which, The Elected Member, won the 1970 Booker Prize, and many of which were subsequently filmed.

Anthony Burgess was someone whose accomplishment as a fibber far surpassed even that of such formidable rivals as Laurens van der Post, Lilian Hellman and Patrick O’Brian. What made fibbing particularly perilous for Burgess, as for most fibbers, was that he rarely remembered his fibs. In consequence they varied widely from telling to telling. The best example of this is the case of the son, Paolo Andrea, of the Italian woman, Liana, whom Burgess precipitately took as his second wife within five or six weeks of the death of his first wife, Lynne. In a 1968 Spectator essay, ‘Thoughts of a Belated Father’, Burgess announced that, having just remarried (in fact the marriage did not take place until three days later), he had acquired a four-year-old stepson.

The bitterness of the immigrant experience, the tumultuous coming of independence to a former British colony, forbidden love and miscegenation within a close-knit Muslim community: dominant themes of Abdul-razak Gurnah’s former novels are gathered together in this one. Since, though not abnormally long, his book ranges over such a wealth of material, there are inevitably occasions when its usually grave, deliberate pace quickens to a scurry, making one wish to shout out at him, ‘Whoa! Not so fast! Not so fast!’ At the start of the narrative, a devout Muslim shopkeeper, Hassanali, in an obscure town along the coast from Mombasa, sets off early one morning in 1899 for the nearby mosque.

There are eerie parallels between the career of the author of this all too brief masterpiece and that of Nicolai Erdman, whose play The Mandate recently opened at the National Theatre. Novelist and playwright both achieved acclaim for pugnaciously satirical works produced in the mid-Twenties, a period of extravagant experiment in the Soviet Union. Then, within a short period, both were suffering the same denunciations — for formalism, objectivism, cosmopolitanism and so forth. Erdman spent three years in Siberia, Olesha fell precipitously from favour. Daunted, they devoted the rest of their lives largely to working on film scripts. Olesha died in 1960, Erdman some ten years later.

At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due. His raffish old comrade in asthma Joe Follows, a financier with a ‘colourful’ past — already met in the second volume, Of Love and Asthma — then persuades him to join in the flotation of a business called Heads You Win. This, at first dedicated merely to headhunting, soon extends to the hectic takeover of dicy concerns on either side of the Atlantic. Having suffered a stroke, it is possible that Joe will not survive for long.

This diptych of a novel starts with a surprise. Margaret Drabble’s fame rests largely on fiction dealing with social issues in contemporary Britain. But here she has taken real-life intrigue, madness and murder in 18th- century Korea as the subject for the first half of her book.

In the summer of 2001 Sofka Zinovieff accompanied her husband, Vassilis — first met when he was press officer to the Greek embassy in Moscow — on a posting back to Athens. This book is both an account of her enthusiastic, if often balked, attempts to transform herself into a Greek, and a vivid evocation of a city in a chaotic ferment of change. That change is at once demonstrated when the couple find a flat, undistinguished except for a tremendous view, in Vouliagmeni, 18 kilometres from the centre of the city. Some 60 years ago, when I used to visit Vouliagmeni before a direct road had been constructed to it, it was little more than a village, with a glorious crescent of a beach backed by a few simple cafés and tavernas.

A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. The jacket quotations from reviews of the author’s previous The Truth About Babies are also clearly spoofs (‘A kind of phenomenology of fatherhood’, TLS, ‘It’s cute and it comes with sharp little teeth’, RTE Guide, ‘Just naff’, the Times).

When Count Mikl.

Sprawling, teeming with people and flooded with an almost malevolent brilliance, this book is the literary equivalent of some vast conurbation. As with a conurbation, it is difficult to identify the heart - and heart here means not merely centre but humanity. Trapped, as in one of Mark Gertler's most famous pictures, on a constantly accelerating roundabout, the characters all seem to be in imminent danger of being hurled into oblivion by the centrifugal force of a powerfully churning imagination. Two of the most important of these characters are a father and son. Digby, once the heir to a company that rivalled Wedgwood in the manufacture of pottery, is now an antique crock among the antique crockery that still remains to him as a reminder of past affluence.

The first four pages of this novel arouse the highest expectations. Some walkers in the Snowdon area stare up at the boilerplate slabs of a crag up which, far above them, a figure is climbing. He is neither carrying the special equipment nor wearing the protective gear usual for a project so dangerous, and he is, as one of the observers remarks in shocked amazement, 'bloody soloing'. Then all at once he plunges to his death. Everyone expects the body that lands on the grass below the crag to be that of some reckless tyro. In fact, it is that of a man eventually identified as one of the most famous of English mountaineers. At 53, he is long past the age when a climb so exacting should be attempted.

Like most human beings, most novelists are neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. This poses a problem for reviewers. A good novelist can write interestingly about mediocre characters; but even a superlative reviewer may find it difficult to write interestingly about mediocre novels. In consequence, reviewers all too often rush to the extremes of proclaiming a novel either a stinker or a masterpiece. In my own time, reviewers have called Anthony Powell the English Proust and C. P. Snow the English Balzac, and compared Olivia Manning's two wartime trilogies to War and Peace. When, some 50 years ago, I published a novel entitled The Widow, my publisher rang up in a state of rare excitement to tell me that a now forgotten reviewer had referred to me as 'Gibbon's successor'.

If Kafka had never existed, critics might now be using the word Warneresque, instead of Kafkaesque, to describe the sort of fiction represented by the three remarkable early novels for which Rex Warner is now chiefly remembered. But then, if Kafka had never existed, perhaps The Wild Goose Chase, The Professor and The Aerodrome would never have existed either. In the way of writers who owe a conspicuous debt to a predecessor, Warner always downplayed his debt to Kafka. But his reading of The Castle in Willa and Edwin Muir's translation of 1930 was clearly one of the decisive events of his life. Another decisive event was his despatch by the British Council to Athens to open an institute in the immediate aftermath of the war. Tabachnick remarks, 'Rex's job was something of a sinecure.