"The dialogue style seems to be contagious."
"Sorry."
"Wasn't the central figure in Glittering Prizes fairly obviously based on Raphael himself?"
"Adam Morris, yes. A successful screenwriter and novelist who wins an Oscar very young and is in a permanent rage about everybody else's failure to appreciate his talents. And haunted throughout his life by his Jewishness, though he claims not to be religious."
"When is the new novel set?"
"At the start of the Blair era."
"So how is the old Adam?"
"Some life left in him yet. Raphael can still write the most marvellous scenes. The new book has plenty: a Los Angeles literary panel where Morris is assailed by an anti-Semitic black academic, an encounter in the Hyde Park underpass with a mugger which leads to Morris being accused of racism by the policeman who comes to interrogate him..."
"A PC PC."
"Inspector, actually. Incidentally, there's a brief section on Morris/Raphael's advice on writing which every aspiring novelist ought to read. Better than a year on a fancy creative writing course, and a lot cheaper. And there's a wonderful confrontation with the youthful editor of a new monthly magazine, Options, whose editor persuades Morris to invest in it."
"No prospect of telling me which magazine it might be based on?"
"You can have a stab. As does this editor chap. He publishes a violently anti-Israel article by the progressive historian Gavin Pope, another of Adam's Cambridge contemporaries, which epitomises the way in which many on the Left have moved, under cover of criticism of Israel, to a position which borders on open anti-Semitism. And Morris/Raphael tears him to shreds over it. Terrific stuff. "
"Timely, too. So has Morris finally come to terms with being Jewish?"
"Maybe. It's the thread which runs from the beginning of the trilogy right through to the end. There's a touching scene in Glittering Prizes when Adam pulls out from his wallet a photograph of a little boy with his hands up, a Jewish kid on his way to extermination. ‘Part of the full story,' Adam says. ‘I always carry it.' Indeed he does. If there's a message to take away, it's that blood, whether that of his immediate family or the wider Jewish one, is thicker than water. And certainly Cam water."
