Fanny notes glumly that Edmund fancies Mary.When Sir Thomas takes a trip to his West Indian plantations, the Crawfords let rip. Regency bobby-dazzlers both urban and urbane, they over-stimulate the Bertram sisters and seduce the reader with their cheeky humour. Her gentle virtues are contrasted with the boisterous fatuity of Bertram’s slackly educated daughters, Maria and Julia. Fanny glides into love with Bertram’s son, Edmund, an honest innocent who hopes to take holy orders.
Into this fragile paradise burst the Crawfords, Henry and Mary. Fanny is a dependent relative supported by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of Mansfield Park. Plot: An austerely ideological novel that details the persecution and eventual triumph of the watchful, withdrawn Cinderella, Fanny Price.

Suffice it to say the denouement removes the last element of choice – the ultimate basis of morality – from the grasp of its twin protagonists, a blemish to haunt the provenance of an otherwise intelligent, slipstreamed foray towards the midnight chimes of intrigue.. And Andrei, sensing the breath of Gerasimov on his neck, may run to ground, or, against the odds, follow the lure of the fatally attractive Francesca.It would be churlish to give the game away. Can a work of art be “the mother of our emotions”? Are “all great men above morality”? Do we care? Is morality fixed, a free-standing entity?Meanwhile, sharp-edged moral dilemmas unfold, and Sophie is faced with a choice between saving Stefan or telling the truth. Has Orlov masterminded the gruesome double murder in Berlin which nudges the narrative into gear? And what’s his connection with Stefan Diederich, the Minister for Culture who has dreamed up the retrospective, then carefully twinned him with Dr McDermott? Diederich, married to careworn Sophie, one of Francesca’s old Berlin buddies, a DDR dissident, is the novel’s Machiavelli.There’s a touch of predictability about the ensuing narrative, which casts Francesca increasingly as the novel’s pivotal force while, just as surely, Andrei Orlov melts without meaning into the text, becoming a cypher touting quotes from the great Russian poets as he moves towards the suitably melodramatic finale.We are apt to wonder both at, and about, a novel which is at once a superbly crafted, seamlessly written entertainment, but also a catechism of questions, some of which sharpen our focus on its theme of love caught up in betrayal, while others seem spurious. A rogue outsider, gone to ground, his predeliction for the old guard renders him dangerously subversive. They set Gerasimov, hard bitten and shy as a mastiff, on his tail. Central casting provides Andrei Orlov, an ex-KGB man, masquerading as Serotkin, an expert in Russian 20th-century “decadent” art.

It ushers in Dr Francesca McDermott, an American art historian, to join him (unaware of his double identity and carefully muddied motives) in assembling in Berlin, in the summer of 1993, a major retrospective show of Russian experimental art.
While he’s off the books of the KGB, Orlov is much on the minds of Yeltsin’s new secret service. Smeared by the fall-out from Cold War melt-down, Piers Paul Read has resurrected the genre we thought abandoned to some Lubyanka of the mind. A Patriot in Berlin, his latest foray into the murk of modern European history, is espionage revisited. But there’s no point in Cartwright trying to be Martin Amis, let alone James Joyce Amateurism is honourable in rugby, but not in prose.. because Cartwright is very good at turns of phrase and local description When something actually happens it is efficiently tense. Clapper, a pitiful figure to begin with, emerges as deeply unpleasant, as if Cartwright had taken violent exception to him for private reasons in the intervening pages.With its po-faced nod to literary precedent, its tiresome, fin-de-Thatcherisme wisdom after the event and its eager, puppyish concern to be The Great London Novel, its ambition is embarrassingly plain, which is a pity.

The trial will determine the events of the day, but Clapper gets everything wrong due to a misguided concern for the underclass. But you can tell their destinies will cross with Northleach’s, and they do.Their fates are bracketed by a prologue and epilogue set in the mind of Julian Clapper, a freelance writer called up for jury service. After a few more, you wish you were reading Ulysses instead.There are interludes: scenes with Jason, a young black pimp, and the prostitute “Channelle”, pathetic crackheads with vague but unrealisable plans to escape from their predicament. The pages devoted to the workings of Anthony’s mind outnumber those about Jason and Chanelle by about ten to one, suggesting that Cartwright’s bond of understanding with them is a little more tenuous. That’s why religious cults are springing up and alternative beliefs, often quite mad, are flourishing Like suppressed memory and satanic abuse.

You don’t want to underestimate the pulling power of the irrational.” Et cetera.The technique reminds you of Joyce, but is it meant to do so? (How can’t it?) After a few dozen pages of this you wonder how much more you can take. And I don’t know about you, but if I want to telegraph a common bond between myself and my fellow tube-travellers, I don’t scratch my balls.Anyway, Cartwright certainly knows Northleach well. His travels around the city on 5 February 1990 dance to the tune of his own interior monologue, a relentless parade of banal observations and received opinions Like: “irrationality survives. It is only there because Northleach (did Cartwright struggle to think that name up?) is Cartwright’s representative on earth, and the novelist likes to think that there is a bond of understanding between himself and everyone on the planet. Anthony’s exterior is unremarkable; like Richard Tull in Martin Amis’s The Information, he is now invisible to passing women. That line about the understanding between him and the Mohican is pure guff.