By Frederic Raphael
JR Books, £16.99
Dust off your classical dictionary; fine-tune your ear to irony, aphorism and erudition. Frederic Raphael's Final Demands fires all his favourite literary feux d'artifice, so you may as well come duly equipped to this third novel in the Glittering Prizes trilogy.
Few readers (and viewers) over 50 need an introduction to Raphael's recurring hero Adam Morris, the too-clever-to-be-kosher Cambridge graduate who, with his coterie of media stars and academics, took the 1960s by storm, scholarship and a soupçon of Hollywood scriptwriting.
Since Prizes was televised in the '70s, Adam's nervily brilliant career, marrying out and socio-political passions have tracked the zeitgeist of an Anglo-Jewish generation. By the time Fame and Fortune (2007) tracked Adam and company through the Thatcher years, they felt like old, fictional friends.
In Final Demands, there is no question of Adam (still writing novels at 68, still hot talk-show property) growing complacently grey: "Still the Jewish pebble, is it, in your shoe gives you your pseudo-Byronic scowl?" he is asked.
We are now in the Blair boom time, but already the coming property collapse is a faint frown on the forehead of Adam's developer brother Derek. To Adam himself, New Labour is simply "socialism with a nose job… served with sun-dried tomatoes". Democracy has clearly gone through the looking glass as he, the quintessential liberal, is branded racist by students, and, by the London Met (albeit briefly), an oppressor of the poor and black man who has harassed him in the Knightsbridge underpass. "Kafka", Adam sighs, "thou shouldst be living at this hour."
Illness, accident and ominous phone-calls create a memento mori at the stage of life when Adam and his Caesar's-wife of a spouse, Barbara, should be relishing the ripened fruits of achievement. Bonded in badinage, this couple certainly satisfy our nostalgia for the durable Jewish (well, half-Jewish) marriage, in this case still moving the earth in Tregunter Road, Chelsea. The morning after making love for "much longer than for many months", Barbara mock-complains she might as well not have bothered having her hair done: "It's still got body", Adam assures her. "So have you."
Far less predictable in love are the Morris children. Adam's tolerance of Rachel's choices - unusual, to say the least, in terms of age, race and sobriety - is offset by his aversion to son Tom's wife, Juliana. Her lineage - granddaughter of a former full-blown Nazi, decamped to Paraguay - is inescapably abhorrent. Yet, in a wry, and touching turn-up for the Talmud, Juliana (now living with Tom in Maimonides's Cordoba) will feel more for the synagogue (and read more Yehuda Halevi) than all her Jewish-born in-laws.
Enthusiasm to catch up with the Glittering Prizewinners encourages rapid devouring of a novel that deserves lingering over, if only to savour the puns ("joined at the hype"), the pensées ("Life is an exercise in reluctance, followed by regret") the classical references and the high-rolling riffs on Israel, journalism and the writing craft.
You may or may not confront the vocabular challenges (Chrestomathy? Maeiutic? Prosopography?) but Final Demands shows that Raphael is not only a master of language but a fine chronicler of our affluent, uncertain times, in which "God may be a comedian" as Adam concludes "but He's rarely a very funny one."
