Not getting to know the general

Byron Rogers

EMBERS by Sandor Marai Viking, £12.99, pp. 213, ISBN 060910996

This book is being marketed as a time capsule. First published in Hungary 60 years ago, every copy, its promotional material claims, was destroyed by the communists from whom the author had fled to the West in 1948. It was only in the mid1990s, when three works by him were discovered in old French translations by a truffling Italian publisher, that the masterpiece re-emerged, which in the last four years has sold almost 500,000 copies in Italy and Germany alone.

And that is just the beginning. At last year's Frankfurt Book Fair, a brisk auction for its English-language rights resulted in this Viking publication of a book 'lost to the world for more than halt a century'. Sandor Marai did not live to see his lateflowering success. He had committed suicide in San Diego in 1989 at the age of 89, which meant, his publicists relentlessly point out, he did not see the fall of the Berlin Wall or 'the restitution of democra

cy to the countries of Central Europe that he so deeply loved'.

One thing jars in all this. From the publishing history in the front of the book it would seem there was no need to go to old French translations, for the work had already been reprinted in Hungary in 1990. That apart, it is still a remarkable piece of packaging: the forgotten masterpiece barnacled with neglect. Poignancy and success, what more could a marketing man want? The result is that a reader approaches this book like Pompey entering the Holy of Holies, and only then, like Pompey, looks around him at ..

A castle somewhere in a forest, somewhere in Europe, at some time in the early part of the last century, where an elderly widower, a general, surname unknown, living alone except for his nurse, now in her nineties, and a large, if unspecified, number of servants, awaits the coming to supper of a guest, once his inseparable friend, whom he hasn't seen in 41 years. The precision of that 41 years is at odds with everything else.

For the book has the soft focus you associate with fables and with foreign art films. Few names are used, few details given, so the general is the General, his mother the Countess, his father the Officer of the Guards. Little attempt is made to build up character or to show this in action, and nothing happens. An old man awaits his guest, and remembers people he does not seem to have known very well.

To establish location and time, you have to rely on such clues as the fact that an emperor, when he visited the country of the Castle, became a king. So it is Hungary, probably between the wars, with many flash-backs to the dual monarchy of the Hapsburgs. That the General has lived through the most momentous events in his country's history is conveyed by such passages as:

'When I was 50, they wanted to put me in charge of an army. I felt I was too young for that, so I resigned. They understood. Besides,' he gestures to the servant to pour the red wine, it was a time when military service offered no satisfaction anymore. The revolution. The end of the monarchy.'

'Yes,' says his guest. 'I've heard about that.'

Ile has heard about it. A world war, the abdication and flight of the royal family, a Red revolution and the bloodbath of the White reaction, and he has heard about it. This is a novel made for students and their examiners. The rest of you might feel you want to kick these two old duffers.

There is of course a great deal of description of the sort known as 'fine writing'.

The castle was a closed world, like a great granite mausoleum full of the mouldering bones of generations of men and women from earlier times, in their shrouds of slowly disintegrating grey silk or black cloth. It enclosed silence itself as if it were a prisoner persecuted for his beliefs, wasting away numbly, unshaven and in rags on a pile of musty, rotting straw in a dungeon. It also enclosed memories as if they were the dead, memories that lurked in damp corners the way mushrooms, bats, rats and beetles lurk in the mildewed cellars of old houses

And so on. And on. And on.

The odd thing is that half-way through the description stops abruptly, and the book becomes an undramatic monologue. Over dinner the old General starts talking to his guest, who responds in monosyllables, and goes on and on. He talks about truth and love and honour and friendship, most of it in the abstract.

Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life? And if a friend fails, because he is not a true friend, is one allowed to attack his character and his weaknesses? What is the value of a friendship in which one person loves the other for his virtue, his loyalty, his steadfastness?

This was plucked at random from over 100 pages of this sort of stuff. The guest allows hours of talk to wash over him, interjecting the odd 'Yes' or 'Thank you', like someone at those interminable teaparties in the Berghof when the Ftihrer unrolled his lunacies over the cream éclairs.

In this lunar night of gabble certain facts emerge, or are glimpsed, which may, or may not, account for the fact that the guest hasn't called in 44 years. By then, having read the lost masterpiece in bed with 'flu in the dark days of January, I frankly couldn't give a damn.