The intelligentsia head south

Adam Thorpe set his previous novel, Between Each Breath, in Hampstead. He moves in his latest to the liberal intelligentsia’s summer hunting ground, the south of France. Nick and Sarah Mallinson, two not quite successful enough Cambridge historians, decamp on their sabbatical to Languedoc with their three young daughters. Their house is rented from the Sandlers, a mercenary pair of art dealers; the husband, Alan, took advantage of the invasion of Iraq to bag a number of archaeological artefacts by dubious means. Intent on completing neglected books and home-educating their children, the Mallinsons’ time dissipates into distraction and peacekeeping between warring kids. Meanwhile, the decidedly weird handyman, Jean-Luc, tends the English lawn that the Sandlers insist on cultivating, in spite of the unsuitable water table and the depredations of the local wild boar. Jean-Luc must also maintain the swimming pool — ‘the standing pool’ of the title — and the endless adjustments required to keep it algae-free and pH neutral are reflected in the lives of the Mallinsons, whose youthful ardour and ambition have been replaced with a constant paddling to stay afloat amidst domestic and professional demands.

Thorpe’s satire on the intellectual class at first seems gentle but has a relentlessness that renders it scorchingly bleak. Nick has failed to become a professor, his academic work has been briefly acclaimed before being forgotten and remaindered and, though he has renounced his solemn Marxism, he yearns for invigorating, active politics. The nearest he gets to that is the occasional whinge about George W. Bush. Sarah, who was Nick’s brilliant graduate student, has found that mothering has swamped her career. Despite being relatively young and in good health, the couple, in their brief moments of respite, ask variations on the same question: what is the point? Not in an I’m-about-to-slit-my-wrists way, but as people of intelligence and imagination who explore the zone between life as it could have been and as it is.