A Legacy (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

The Anglo-German writer Sybille Bedford, who died in 2006, is no longer well-known, though one of her later novels was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1989.

Yet her work has been variously praised by VS Pritchett, Alan Hollinghurst, Hilary Mantel, and Bruce Chatwin - who said, "When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners". As those names imply, Bedford is the stylist's stylist.

A Legacy is a slender, brilliant novel, Bedford's first, and a good place to start. It is the inter-linked story of three wealthy German families in the years before the First World War, partly based on the history of Bedford's own family.

The Merzes are a wealthy Berlin Jewish family, living a comfortable, incurious, well-padded life. The von Feldens are countryside Catholic aristocrats, who follow their ancestors' habits and tend their land, "diminishing rather than otherwise". And the Bernins, the von Feldens' ambitious and worldly neighbours, pursue their political ambitions in the newly unified Germany.

The tragedy, the `legacy', of the book is the experience of sensitive, animal-loving Johannes, one of the four von Felden sons, who is sent to a military training camp at fifteen. Neither he nor his family ever recover from the bullying he suffers there.

As the three families grow increasingly closely linked by marriage, the novel describes both the 'mores' of their daily lives - the ten-course meals, the dresses, the letters, the journeys, the parties - and the 'tempora', the changing face of Germany, where the brutality of Johannes's treatment will eventually result in the Third Reich.

Yet Bedford paints with the lightest of touches. Politics and history are simply part of her characters' lives, as they are part of - as they are - ours. She can portray a character's entire moral universe in a few lines of dialogue and a detail, trusting us to fill in the rest.

As the New Yorker wrote of her, "That is one of the joys of reading her: she thinks we are as sophisticated as she is. Her writing is like the conversation of a clever, worldly friend who we wish would come by more often."

In the novel, one character, a middle-aged heiress tired of paying her dissolute husband's gambling debts, takes solace in collecting new work by Monet - and Bedford's style is equally Impressionist, omitting much, but creating dazzling movement, light and colour.

This is a remarkable mix of tumultuous memory and social history, written in an allusive and demanding style which needs but repays close attention as you read. Poignant incidents and extraordinary characters, all described in the most telling detail, make it a unique and exciting experience.

This is quite a hefty read and it is thickly allusive and sometimes almost impenetrable as it describes the extensive family relationships of the Merz family, members of the upper-bourgeouisie of Berlin, related to the dozen or so families whose money came from banking and trade, but who also patronised the arts and sciences. The eldest son, Eduard, married an admirable wife, but he was a clubman, a rake, a gambler, his debts paid most often by his father, but more unusually, also by his wife. Sarah Genz-Castell, a clear-brained, elegant heiress. The von Felden family became connected to the Merz family through the marriage of the middle von Felden, Julius, to the delightful Melanie Merz. The youngest, Johannes was a gentle child, driven insane by his one experience of life outside the family as an army recruit. There is a sad and quite far-reaching history of his life within the pages of this book.

What is the legacy, therefore? The money from both families, received by Julius, or the strain of madness that Johannes carries on through a life devoted to caring for the army's horses? Perhaps both, though this is by no means a book which gives up its secrets - much of it would seem to be semi-autobiographical, especially towards the end when Sybille herself might stand in for the daughter allowed only to see her English mother fleetingly, in a railway restroom.

Sybille Bedford is praised by Bruce Chatwin, as "one of the most dazzling practitioners of modern English prose." Perhaps, in part, but I did not find it easy to read or to decipher. It felt very choppy in the way it handled dialogue - lots of shorthand expostulation, lots of pained, abrupt posturing coupled with long thick blocks of very informative but I should not call it "dazzling" prose. It is, I think, very much of its time and we don't feel it necessary to write with quite such circumlocution these days. Strangely enough I couldn't find much about the anti-Jewish atmosphere of the demi monde - the books seems far more exercised about the recent Prussian-German unification. It is clear that money cleared the lines, certainly for marriage, though Melanie had to convert to Catholicism. Neither of the families worries overmuch about religious affairs.

Nevertheless this is a fearsomely complex story of a time before the First World War, when people with money could afford to indulge their liking for houses and good food and their jaunts to Spain and Italy. As such it is a marvellous panorama of a wholly different world.