In fact, Tarquin is blithely, if at times coyly, open about himself and his deeds and – more to the point – his misdeeds. The epigraph that Lanchester does choose, an amusing remark by Bertrand Russell about Wittgenstein’s philosophical obtuseness, is no doubt intended to alert us to the fact that we are in for an extended dose of undependable narration. Equally, he might have echoed the Underground Man: “Though we may be capable of sitting underground for 40 years without saying a word, if we do come out into the world and burst out, we will talk and talk and talk …” Indeed, Lanchester could have taken as his epigraph Humbert Humbert’s wry observation that “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”. The book is one in a long, dark series that includes Diderot’s masterpiece Rameau’s Nephew, Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and any number of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, from The Eye through Despair to, of course, Lolita. As he says himself, the real point about the conjunction of art and evil “is not that the megalomaniac is a failed artist but that the artist is a timid megalomaniac”. He is a middle-aged gourmand, scholar and monstre damné he is also a kind of artist, with an artist’s ambition, ruthlessness and greed for recognition. The narrator, Tarquin – real name Rodney – Winot, is a wonderful invention, at once appalling and appealing, if only for the pathos of his self-delusions, and lucidly, utterly mad. Polished, assured, intricately plotted and immaculately written, it is a work any longestablished novelist would be proud to claim. Hard to believe that, when it came out in 1996, it really was John Lanchester’s first book. The Debt to Pleasure is, among many other things, one of the most remarkable debut novels of recent decades.

The debt to pleasure