Finding a 'lost' classic

Discovering a new master is a rarity, in literature as in painting. Sandor Marai was a well-known Hungarian writer in the 1930s, but is new to the extent that this is the first of 20 books he has written to be translated into English. But Embers is definitely a small masterpiece. A strangely arresting work, the kind of book you have never quite read before, it leaves you groping for parallels. The feeling is central European, yet there is something more. Imagine a cocktail of Chekhov's The Seagull, Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Lampedusa's The Leopard, throw in a whodunnit element and you begin to get the flavour.

Despite its definite setting in the Vienna of the Austro-Hungarian empire, then in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, it is a tale out of time. There are only four characters: a general, his ancient nurse, his friend and his wife. The friend is virtually silent, the old retainer retains what she knows, the wife, being dead, says nothing and the general, in the course of a highly atmospheric tete-a-tete dinner that takes up much of the book, does the talking. The plot (not to be given away) is classical in its spareness, Racinian in its dramatic absolutes and clash of passions. If that makes it sound ritualistic, it isn't, and the impact is oddly fresh. The story, intensely human, works beautifully, both as a rumination on past time and as a novel of suspense.

It is a tale about friendship between two disparate men. The general is an aristocrat and his friend a commoner. The soldier is soldierly, his friend musically inclined. They grew up together and their comradeship is unusually intense. We think we know where the story may be going, but one of the main attractions of this novel is that the obvious reading is frustrated at every step, as the mental categories of our era fail to fit. The friends are from starkly different backgrounds yet it is not a novel about status, in which it is demonstrated for our edification that the social inferior is the superior human being.

Nor is Embers a confrontation between the dictates of order and those of art. And, to confound our expectations further, the intimacy of the two men has none of the homoerotic overtones we have been taught to superimpose retrospectively on any male/male affection. "The eros of friendship," muses the general, in one of the reflective passages on the theme, "has no need of the body."

So what is left? A ferocity of emotion whose paradoxes and inversions are conveyed in wonderfully acute language and whose denouement is as exciting as a detective tale. The fading of empire is there, so is the passing of aristocracies and their codes but, as in the best of Chekhov, nostalgia and tension are brilliantly mixed.

The Hungarians were Christianised late, and a pagan force can be felt in their writing right up to the 20th century. It is there in the descriptions of Hungary's brutish latifundia by Zsigmond Moricz (a contemporary of Marai, whose Be Faithful Unto Death was recently translated by Stephen Vizinczey), and, beneath the highly poised prose, it is there in Marai's novel.

This raw power of feeling is one explanation for the book's remarkable success abroad. Who would have thought that an old general discoursing on the nature of friendship could enthuse a modern audience, even if his monologue takes the form of a psychodrama? Yet Embers has recently sold 250,000 copies in Italy and 230,000 in Germany and, though Continental reading tastes can differ wildly from our own, I would be surprised if this superb novel left the British sensibility untouched. In our earnestly unconventional times it is a thrill to read something so startlingly - though not wilfully - original.