The fading of the Cambridge dawn

An exhausting life it must be, being the hero of a Frederic Raphael novel. There you are, writing your bestselling books, finessing those Hollywood film scripts that pile up on your doorstep like fallen leaves, pondering those offers to sit on the boards of TV companies and wondering all the while what the nasty man in the Times Literary Supplement is going to say about you, and then alongside floats a whole convoy of merely human dilemmas craving resolution. The sister of your dead college chum wants a saucy threesome, the admiring fan met in Venice murmurs, ‘I would do anything to spend time with you’, while the wife of your bosom, a quarter of a century soignée, and not to be outdone, opens the door stark-naked with a cry of ‘Special offer!’ The Alfa Romeo (‘paid for by a two-week rewrite of a movie that was never made’) must be scant compensation.

Even more wearying than the girls who throw themselves at you, perhaps, is the obligation to be funny. Well, witty. Well, to keep your conversational end up. We first met Mr Morris here, with his PhD in the higher banter, 30 years ago in The Glittering Prizes, one of the great upmarket tele-novels of the era, and time has neither mellowed his acerbity nor deflated his sense of amour-propre. A son throwing over Cambridge for the Moonies, a wife (wrongly) suspecting adultery, Mrs Thatcher — the novel starts in 1979 — sudden death, trauma, terminal illness? The Morris preventative against life’s little ironies is fail-safe: raise your head from the table-top of the fashionable restaurant and wisecrack. ‘Mike Clode’s line,’ his media mogul chum announces from the other end of the telephone.