Versatility and Virtuosity

It’s a strange business to be looking at some of the big books that press for attention at this time of year. A historical thriller about the pursuit of the regicides of Charles I by Robert Harris, a man who has written thrillers about the great Roman orator Cicero, about algorithms and Munich, about the Dreyfus affair and the Lord knows what. Then in a different category, there is the new novel by Kamila Shamsie, the London-based Pakistani-born novelist who is followed by multitudes but who is only incidentally a popular novelist. Her last novel, Home Fire, reviewed in Quadrant, was a masterpiece: a re-enactment of the Antigone myth so swift and so idiomatic—dead boy implicated in ISIS, Muslim Home Secretary, blindingly righteous girl—that it sweeps the reader trained in this sort of thing along so compellingly that by the time he recognises the prototype Sophocles and Hegelian dialectic have become footnotes to the novel.

Then, like nothing on earth, there are the two…