The historical novel is so ubiquitous nowadays as to be almost the standard fictional form; it has become quite daring to write of contemporary life. And the genre has bloomed since the likes of Zoe Oldenberg and Margaret Irwin. Overt didacticism is out - the ill-concealed history lesson - along with, on the whole, the blockbuster of period sex and violence. There has been some marvellously subtle and intricate historical writing in recent years - Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, Lawrence Norfolk's work. The Alexandria Semaphore, chronologically the earliest of a trilogy about the fortunes of a Greek-Catholic Syrian family in late 19th-century Egypt, has no such intellectual complexity but is nevertheless determinedly modern in its approach: immediate in manner, no sledge-hammer instruction, land the reader in the midst of the time and the place.
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