THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN
by Claire Messud
Picador, £14.99; 431pp

IN HER SECOND NOVEL, The Last Life, Claire Messud looked at the history of France’s disastrous enmeshment in Algeria and its end through the understanding of a 15-year-old girl.

It was a book of rare perfection, distilling the political through the personal with sympathy, depth and an infinitely nuanced perception of the workings of the human heart and the mind. After the two gem-like novellas that made up her next work, The Hunters, she returns to the interlacing of the public and the private and turns her attention, surprisingly, to 9/11 for The Emperor’s Children.

Surprising, because she is the farthest from the bandwagon-jumping type one can imagine a writer to be. One might have thought that an event which redefined the geopolitical order, at least for our lifetimes, would have to be slowly assimilated before writers worked out its many ramifications in their fiction or appropriated it, as many have done, for near-hysterical outpourings of injured self-righteousness.

But no, 9/11 provides a cosmetic backdrop and an excuse for lazy plotting in Jay McInerney’s empty novel The Good Life, it is central to Ken Kalfus’s shrieking satire A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and is almost a brief noise-off in Benjamin Kunkel’s hip and witty Indecision. Jonathan Safran Foer locked horns with it in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, producing an original and moving work marred by sentimentality and whimsy.

In The Emperor’s Children, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it doesn’t happen until page 370 of a 430-page novel, but the reader’s knowledge that it is imminent creates a dramatic irony as loaded, inevitable and almost as relentless as a Greek tragedy.

Yet this is not a 9/11 novel. It is nothing less than an inquiry into the moral codes that animate us, the authenticity of human actions and the validation and validity of such actions to both the introspective private self and the outer public world. It asks tough questions about the possibilities of self-knowledge and self-deception, whether we live lives or a thin, textualised hand-down of real experience.

The story takes place in Manhattan, in nine months from March to November 2001. It follows three friends, all just over 30, all struggling in their own ways to find a core of meaning that will shore up their slightly aimless lives into something more purposeful and individual.

Danielle, a television producer, is casting around for an idea for an intelligent documentary to make her name. Marina Thwaite has reached a dead end with a long overdue book on the cultural significance of children’s clothing. She flounders around looking for something to prove her a worthy daughter to her father, the celebrated intellectual, writer and journalist Murray Thwaite. Julius Clarke, a penniless writer of elegant, acid book reviews, is starved of money and fame, and puzzles about how to acquire both in one quick stroke.

At a dinner party on the final evening of a research trip to Sydney, Danielle meets the sinister, magnetic Ludovic Seeley, who has grand plans to take Manhattan — he has been chosen by an Australian media mogul, Augustus Merton, to start a new iconoclastic cultural magazine, The Monitor.

Seeley fetches up in New York and is introduced by Danielle to the beautiful Marina, whom he hires to work on the magazine. Meanwhile, Murray Thwaite is having second thoughts about the secret work of his lifetime, which is portentously entitled How to Live, and is the distillation of a lifetime’s wisdom and knowledge into a work of Senecan magnitude.

Into all these lives comes the 20-year-old Frederick Tubb, Murray’s nephew from provincial Watertown, an overweight, incandescently idealistic autodidact, armed with nothing more than Emerson, Tolstoy and a dogged zeal to leave an indelible mark on the world.

Murray sees his younger self in the boy — the same will to succeed, the same thirst for self-improvement and self-invention — and decides to give him a leg-up by hiring him as an amanuensis. But the presence of such idealism and innocence among these jaded adult lives is a spark to a tinderbox.

Like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, or Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Frederick is both a mirror to this society and its agent of unravelling. Lives intersect with disastrous consequences under the looming shadow of a greater, public disaster.

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