Sauntering towards catastrophe

Imagine the worst came to pass, and some mishap - God forbid! - befell 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines in the bitter mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Journalists piece together from survivors and Afghan witnesses an account of what went wrong. Years from now, historians will tease out the long-run causes for the disaster, pick over Mr Blair's relationship with Mr Bush, sonorously conclude that Britain had world ambitions its soldiers could not be expected to execute. Later still, some historical novelist will reconstruct the domestic scene, and tell private stories of men, women and children as they saunter or march towards catastrophe.

In The Mulberry Empire, Philip Hensher tells the the story of an actual British disaster in Afghanistan. His book opens with Alexander Burnes's first diplomatic mission to the Amir Dost Mohammed in 1832 to head off Russian infiltration. It ends 10 years later with the headlong retreat of the British army from Kabul, in which 16,000 British and Indian soldiers are cut to pieces and just a single civilian survives.

Like all historical novels, since Walter Scott launched the enterprise with Waverley in 1814, The Mulberry Empire is quite unhistorical. It awards its characters both the hindsight and the pre-occupations of its author's day. Hensher, his characters, and his readers all know that this is the First Afghan War, it will end badly, the Afghans are rough customers and the British Empire is anyway doomed.

What distinguishes Hensher as modern is not merely that he knows all that. He has a much wider and more chaotic view than Walter Scott of the tributary causes of his disaster. We pass through an array of far-flung scenes - London high society, a spiteful literary coterie of the manner of the Edinburgh Review, Gloucestershire, St Petersburg and the Crimea, the Calcutta bazaar - before our appointment with catastrophe on the Jalalabad road.

It is as if a Victorian three-decker had been detonated, and come down in a hail of masonry and timbers. Some are the strewn pieces, such as Burnes's illicit love affair with Bella Garraway in London, are grand and lapidary. Others - a homosexual rape in a Calcutta barracks, a suicide in the Viceroy's camp - are vicious little fragments. Others still, like the accounts of Indian courts and British officialdom, are disjointed into caricature.

Scattered amid the ruins are the appropriate Victorian literary deities. Kipling presides over the barracks scenes, Turgenev takes us through the Crimean countryside, Dickens drags us through the London-mud, Thackeray and Stendhal turn their backs on the battles. I'm not sure where Hensher's Afghans come from but they are socko. Everything is massive, sumptuously-made and finished, the characters rich, lively and unexpected, the decor (loo-tables, tantaluses, jezails) Victorian in its precision, variety and profusion.

And over everything is a pall of foreboding, which is fulfilled in a fashion both more private and more horrible than the reader fears or expects.

A generation ago, JG Farrell in his novel of the Indian Mutiny, The Siege of Krishnapur (which won the Booker Prize in 1973) gave the British in India the sort of odd magnificence that Scott gave his Jacobites in Waverley. Hensher has no time for any of that. The destruction of the British army is retribution not for British India's wickedness or misjudgments but for its frivolity.

Hensher ruthlessly alters historical characters, or in one case combines them, to give us imbeciles. Even Burnes is a booby under the skin.

The novel ends at a London circus which is staging a sentimental reenactment of the safe return of the British women to Jalalabad. Hensher's consolation is Bella Garraway and her beloved son in the audience. Behind the delusions of history, the novelist says, are some secure items of private experience

James Buchan's latest novel is A Good Place to Die (The Harvill Press).