Bad Relations, by Cressida

But if the reader finds Walsh to be a bit of a show-off, the relish and humour with which Walsh directs his ruthless gaze on his own shortcomings and social gaffes will make you chuckle and like him simultaneously.

Early in his career, while on probation at Gollancz, he is summoned for a dressing-down by his chairman, who says, ‘The point is, Mr Walsh, this is a sleeves-rolled-up working environment. You are here not to socialise but to get work done. There is plenty of time after work for informality.’

Another time, when he mentions to Sally Emerson, editor of Books and Bookmen, ‘in a callow, braggartish way’ that he’s recently had dinner with Douglas Adams, Sally merely nods sweetly at Walsh. With disarming, self-deprecating irony, Walsh writes, ‘Perhaps she didn’t want to steal my thunder by mentioning that she’d been having a raging affair with Douglas for some months.’

Far beyond being a vehicle for delightful gossip and anecdotes, this book is a thought-provoking account of a decade of exuberance in which the English novel found new confidence and noisily asserted itself on the international stage.

‘In the fiction of the 1980s, the English language was cleansed of indolence, fog and banality,’ Walsh writes. ‘In their place came hyperactivity, attack, clarity, surging narrative’ – qualities to be found in this enormously enjoyable book.

Circus of Dreams made me happy to be an oldie. We were lucky enough to experience all the messy, noisy, spontaneous, jostling, raucous fun of office life. That was before the joyless practice of communicating via screen and electronic media drove us apart into today’s blander, drearier, lonelier working world.

‘So tell me a little bit about yourself. A very little bit’

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH

Russia invades again

FRANCES WILSON Bad Relations By Cressida Connolly Viking £14.99

There are many remarkable things about Cressida Connolly’s third novel, whose subject is historical recurrence, and the most striking is the timing of its publication.

How could Connolly have known, as she imagined the impact of the Crimean War on several generations of the same family, that the book would appear just as the Russians were hellbent on destroying Ukraine?

Bad Relations, which divides into three parts, begins on the battlefields of Sevastopol where, in the spring of 1855, William Gale is cutting locks of auburn hair from the head of his brother, Algernon, whose dead body is still warm. Their mother and sister, and Algie’s fiancée, can wear the hair close to their hearts, behind a brooch or in a locket.

While Algernon, a dreamy, slow and serious boy who had liked drawing, was not equipped for military life, when William returns to his wife, Alice, he will be one of the first recipients of the Victoria Cross. By then, however, he will be a changed man – because war does that to people. The distinguished hero proves himself to be a singularly undistinguished husband.

At home with the Gales, Connolly catches the weight of relationships in which men cannot access their emotions and women cannot air their views on anything. ‘Since her husband had been away at war, Alice had often found herself obliged to listen to men’s opinions about the Russian campaign; it was not the exception but the general rule that they knew less about it than herself; yet decorum had it that she should not say so.’

After the age of 40, Alice realises, men would talk to her as if she ‘were a wall’. Unsettled by his wife’s opinions, William is doing so already and, after their marriage unravels like a row of knitting, he takes advantage of the Matrimonial Causes Act to get himself divorced. Alice and her young son start again in Australia, and William marries a poisonous war widow called Sarah.

Following his two lines of descendants, Connolly explores what is passed down a family line, along with DNA, medals and mourning brooches. Bad blood, we can be sure, will out.

In Connolly’s fiction, families are rarely safe places to be. There is a peculiar savagery in the 20th-century progeny of William and Sarah Gale, whom we meet in the novel’s second part. The setting is now Cornwall in the summer of 1977, where Stephen, an art-school dropout from Melbourne, comes to stay with his cousins, Celia and Nick Clarke, on their idyllic farm.

Celia, current custodian of the treasured VC, hails from Sarah, while Stephen is descended from Alice. Stephen is also the incarnation of Algernon: auburn, art-loving, illequipped for what comes his way.

Out of his depth in upper-crust Englishness, Stephen falls in love with one of the Clarke daughters and sleeps with the other. When a fox gets into the hen coop, he has a foreboding. What happens to him that summer is hellish and hard to bear: it’s a long time since I cried over a character in a book.

The book’s final section begins in 2015 and moves between Cornwall, where the Clarke sisters are dividing the spoils after their mother’s death, and Melbourne, where Hazel, Stephen’s sister, becomes interested in the family tree and tries to piece together the threads of the last two centuries.

The fate of the VC, which has found its way to Australia, determines the narrative: the medal measures the nobility of everyone who handles it.

The plot is neat, tight and unexpected but the novel’s deep satisfaction comes from Connolly’s total immersion in historical atmosphere and profound understanding of human pain.

Her previous novel, After the Party, is about 1930s fascism infiltrating, unawares, a family of sisters. In Bad Relations, Connolly weighs up the cruelty of a Victorian marriage against the barbarism of seventies Bohemia.

By resting her eye on what is not seen by the characters, and drawing our attention to the things they do not hear, she describes domestic worlds whose inhabitants are sleepwalkers.

We similarly sleepwalk through history, Connolly suggests. In the final pages, Stephen’s younger sister, Hazel, visits her Cornish cousins and reflects on the ironies of the Crimean War.

‘It’s funny to think that all these men went out to fight the Russian invasion. Gave their lives, a lot of them. And now the Russians have got it, after all. There didn’t seem to be a whisper from the international community when they invaded, this time.’