Zuleika Dobson (Modern Library) [Paperback]

Though a great part of the novel's charm lies in its evocation of a world now vanished - the pre-Great War Oxford of aesthetes and hearties, Max's own fascination with the demi-monde and the music hall - its great genius, and the greatest delight for the reader, lies in the author's own inimitable narrative voice. Beerbohm, as he tells us in an early aside, has been selected by the muse Clio for the purpose of relating the lovely Zuleika's story as fact, and thereafter we see him wholly (even uneasily) aware of the Olympian task that has been laid upon him, trying to reconcile the appropriate flights of Homeric eloquence with the crashing, inarticulate bathos of Edwardian undergraduate idiom, of which he unerringly manages to seek out and present, with a sort of apologetic helplessness, the worst possible examples. Re-reading "Zuleika Dobson" I suddenly saw for the first time exactly what Donna Tartt means in "The Secret History", when she writes that English is, in some ways, just not suited to Greek translation. But has anyone but Beerbohm ever exploited the disparity to such precise comic effect? And yet "Zuleika Dobson" is a profoundly beautiful piece of art as well. "I am never quite certain," says the author at one point, "whether I be or be not quite a gentleman." And the answer, of course, is that he is not, quite - any more than the wild fauns in Saki's drawing-rooms can be made quite respectable by putting them in starched collars and patent shoes - and for the same reason; that Beerbohm is at heart a Pagan, and that despite a few cursory nods in the text to Heaven, and Hell, and the startling number of Old Judasians who become clergymen, Zuleika Dobson is, au fond, a Pagan book, a book in which beauty and art and youth are not mere worldly gauds but ideals in themselves. And it is because of this intrinsic Paganism that in the end the bathos rises above farce to become something of real pity and art in its own right. If you have been an undergraduate, the chances are that you will have been at least half a young Pagan yourself, and Zuleika Dobson will ravish your heart. I genuinely cannot understand how any reviewer can possibly have awarded it fewer than five stars. I'd give it more, if I could.

Zuleika, as the student population soon finds, is utterly captivating and her suitor, the Duke of Dorset, has a wonderful pomposity that Beerbohm pricks with witty cleverness. The supporting characters are just as credibly drawn, all contributing to a very amusing, thoughtful and entertaining story.

Those who would dismiss it as full of preening self-regard and snobbishness have clearly overlooked Beerbohm's subtle self-deprecation. I'm surprised the book's treacle-treading detractors haven't also pointed out two rather glaring geographical errors in the first few pages (you'll have to find them yourselves).

But, those aside, this novel is rightly a classic.