CONSPIRATORS
by Michael André Bernstein
Faber £12.99 pp506

Empire is a tempting but treacherous theme for fiction. Promising sweep and grandeur, and imperial gravitas, it actually makes heavy demands on the novelist. Focus too closely on individual person- alities and your empire becomes too small to be meaningful. Try for too great a sweep, on the other hand, and you risk turning your characters into pins, whose only role is to anchor the map of imperial power in place.

Two new novels tackle two very different empires in very different ways. In My Life as Emperor, Su Tong, the author of Raise the Red Lantern, gives us a portrait of a mythical Chinese empire, starting from the day when a 14-year-old boy is crowned as its ruler. Emperor Duanbai turns out to be afflicted with many of the vices of boyhood, but his ascension to absolute power means that, instead of pulling the wings off flies, he is free to cut the tongues out of concubines. After a career characterised mainly by elaborate and arbitrary acts of cruelty, he is deposed by his half-brother.

Disenfranchised, he wanders his lands as an impoverished commoner before eventually becoming a tightrope walker. Both period and geography are left hazy; indeed, in his foreword, Su Tong stresses that his story is not intended as historical fiction, but instead is “a pleasure cruise through my inner world”. His Xie empire is a dreamlike, beautiful, brutal place, which gives the reader the familiar sensation of something having been lost in translation (although the translation, by Howard Goldblatt, is excellent). The action is dictated by aesthetic rather than narrative logic: the prose is full of gorgeous images, and symbols that never quite develop into meaning.

For Su Tong, empire is a concept, an excuse to dream up ever more remarkable scenes. Michael André Bernstein could not be more different. Where Tong’s novel slips by like a series of magic lantern slides, Bernstein’s lingers to note every detail, and takes care to justify each event. An intricate account of an assassination plot (but not that assassination plot), Conspirators is set in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the period leading up to the first world war.

Count-governor Wiladowski of Galicia is the novel’s most imperial figure: around him cluster the interlocking stories of a young Jewish spy master, a Jewish business- man, a charismatic rabbi and the would-be assassins themselves. The action moves from castle to club, aristocratic household to working-men’s cafe, convincingly depicting the full social spectrum of Franz Josef’s crumbling realm. But such compendiousness has a price, which here is paid by the characters, who struggle to become more than diligently animated ciphers. Bernstein’s plots nest inside one another like a set of Russian dolls: just as we grow interested in one babushka, she’s discarded to reveal the next. Ultimately, both novels pay the price of imperial ambition: with such huge aims, something has to give — as emperors inevitably discover.

Available at Books First prices of £8.79 plus 99p p&p and £10.39 (Conspirators) plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

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