The Pendragon Legend, review: Upper-class chomps and femmes fatales pitched into dark country-house thriller

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It is impossible to read Antal Szerb’s work without thinking about his terrible fate. He was born in Budapest in 1901, the son of assimilated Jewish parents but he was baptised a Catholic. He travelled through Europe in the 1920s, spending a year in Britain, but returned to Hungary where he published his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (1934), a tale of mysticism and romance set in a Welsh castle. But in 1944, Szerb was deported to a Nazi prison camp. He was executed during a forced march near the end of the war. Then, about 20 years ago, Szerb was suddenly rediscovered thanks to Pushkin Press and the translator Len Rix. “Szerb belongs with the master novelists of the 20th century,” wrote The Daily Telegraph. Ali Smith called him “one of the great European writers”.

The Pendragon Legend, reissued last month by Pushkin, begins with an encounter between two unlikely figures when a young Hungarian scholar Janos Batky is introduced to the Earl of Gwynedd, a reclusive eccentric who is the subject of strange rumours. Intrigued by the Hungarian, the Earl invites him to his family seat, Pendragon Castle in North Wales. Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go. But he goes anyway and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism, underground tombs and the constant threat of murder.

Szerb and his hero Batky are both astonishingly erudite. Rather like Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel and Emeric Pressburger’s screenplay for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Pendragon Legend is equally at home in a very English world and in European history. The novel moves between a beautifully captured pre-war London with tea at the Ritz and encounters at the Café Royal and the wild world of rural Wales, all described with perfect pitch.

Above all, the novel is a gothic thriller, full of dark foreboding, exotic locations and femmes fatales. The plot constantly twists and turns. Someone is out to kill the Earl, but who? And why? Or is it the mysterious Earl, locked away with his strange experiments into eternal life, who is the real villain? Batky is the perfect detective to solve these mysteries. He is passionate about the dark history of the occult, from medieval times to the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. As he tells one of his unlikely companions, he has a “profound attachment to things out of the ordinary”.

Szerb is a master novelist. On the one hand, this novel is full of dark menace. But on the other, it is a kind of gay romp, full of upper-class chumps and strange women. It’s a country- house drama that gets darker and more perverse by the minute.

One reason for the new fascination with Szerb is that he is a writer for our times. He plays with literary conventions and The Pendragon Legend is full of texts – letters, old manuscripts, telegrams and, of course, books full of esoteric knowledge. Then there is the quality of the writing. Szerb has a terrific turn of phrase. When Batky meets a young man in the Reading Room of the British Museum he is struck by out of place he seems. “I quickly diagnosed his condition: it was his first time in the Reading Room, and he felt like a man on his first day in the madhouse.” Later the narrator tells us “how every room I inhabit comes in no time at all to look hostile and abandoned... Piles of shabby books accumulate on every horizontal surface, their dusty monotony relieved here and there by a cheap pipe.” Rix and Pushkin Press have rediscovered a genius.