What a wonderful, gruelling novel with moral questions woven through. A Englishman learns that his baby son, whom he had to leave behind with his wife in wartime Paris, has been lost in the chaos of occupation. After the war he returns to France to discover if an unknown small boy in a poor orphanage is indeed his son. It’s a book that engages your mind while clawing at your heart.

It’s brilliantly written: detached and even, which may be the best way to convey the dilemma. The Englishman has suffered loss and does not want to suffer again even if the child is really his – but he is also priggish and, despite his good manners, somewhat intolerant. Perhaps the strained relationship with his mother is of his doing as much as hers. The experience of spending a week in a half-destroyed French backwater makes him re-examine what he knows and feels – not just the awfulness of living in a country where many are still suffering from the war but also his own prejudices.

She spoke carefully now. ‘Yes, by our present standards he is healthy – but only by those standards. The doctor tells me he has a tendency to rickets; this will doubtless get worse, because soon he will be about six and then there will be no more milk for him – but then most of our children have a tendency to rickets. He is certainly anaemic. If he gets a cold, if he cuts his leg, it will take him longer than it should to recover, but that also is true of all our children. . . . We have tubercular children here. If you knew more of Europe, monsieur, you would know that to run the risk of being infected with tuberculosis in a home where you have a bed to sleep in and regular meals is to-day to have a fortunate childhood.’

I noted this, which chimes today in an era of online BTL echo chambers:

Hilary was saying to himself as they walked along, but how in God’s name can he be happy in this one-eyed town? I should die of boredom if I had to live in the provinces in England. I suppose, he thought resentfully, that he has this capacity for happiness Pierre was talking about. But does that mean, he questioned, that one is able to live anywhere, like people uncritically and just be happy? Yet how could one be happy if one had only fools to talk to? Is he perhaps imbued with the old sentimental belief that the recognition of true worth in anyone makes them a desirable companion on a level of common humanity?

It’s a belief that we English intellectuals have totally discarded, he mused. We are bored and resentful if we are expected to be companionable with anyone not of our own sort – unless, that’s to say, he’s a left-wing politically conscious tramway-worker. And that, I suppose, is why our work lacks universality; we deliberately encase ourselves in an esoteric coterie and lack the material to generalise about human emotions.