Three characters in search for a life

IT is tempting to regard this book as a metaphor for the decline of England during the 20th century. Given that the three lives described all ended in largely unrealised promise and disappointment, the temptation is understandable. And since Sebastian Faulks speckles each biography with ruminations on the nature of Englishness, avoiding the metaphorical opportunity begins to look like churlishness.

This is a trio of tragedies compounded by the fact that the subjects were physically attractive and, if somewhat selectively, highly personable. Actually, one aspect of character they appear to have shared is a certain arrogance which eventually proved to have been misplaced. Take, for example, Faulks's final choice, Jeremy Wolfenden, who acquired a damning soubriquet in his youth as "the cleverest man in England". Possibly this was true, but Wolfenden's subsequent career as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Telegraph indicates a distinct lack of wisdom or even common sense which makes any amount of cleverness redundant.

Wolfenden's finals examiner at Oxford, after awarding him eight alphas, commented: "He wrote as though it were all beneath him; he wrote as though it were all such a waste of time." Foolishly convinced of his own superiority, soon after being posted to Moscow during the Cold War he was entrapped by the KGB and drawn into a complicated tangle of espionage from which he never managed to extricate himself. Already a notable consumer of alcohol, he became steadily more reliant on the bottle, finally destroying his liver and ending his life at the age of just 31. Somehow, not all of Faulks's special pleading can make Wolfenden's wasted existence look terribly clever.

Similarly, the second subject, Richard Hillery, who had a brief but glorious career in the RAF during the second World War, appears notable above all for the inflated opinion he possessed of his own abilities. She down and hideously deformed through extensive burns on his face and body, Hillery even in hospital, according to Faulks, retained a "supercilious manner and provocative conversation". Described by a fellow patient as a "conceited young man with an inferiority complex", he went on to write a book about his experiences before going to his death (aged 23) when he inadvisedly resumed flying.

Called The Last Enemy, Hillery's account of life in the air force enjoyed a certain modest renown during his lifetime, but the references to it here suggest a rather tiresome bravado rather than any real talent. The same can probably also be said of the abilities of the third member of Faulks's triumvirate, English painter Christopher Wood, who lived in Paris during the 1920s and then jumped in front of a train at the age of 29.

Again, no amount of special pleading can make Wood's work look much more than competent. English art in the 20th century has consistently suffered from a sense of anxious inferiority, its practitioners desperate to prove that their efforts are as fine as anything produced elsewhere. It's interesting that Wood felt the necessity, as soon as he settled on painting, to move away from his native country. For many years, according to Faulks, his biggest difficulty was achieving sufficient self discipline because he seems to have preferred playing the role of artist among his socialite friends to creating art itself. By the time he eventually focused on painting, he had become addicted to opium and subject to delusions of persecution, making his suicide almost an inevitability. Although a valiant attempt is made here to inflate Wood's posthumous reputation, he remains, like the other two figures included in this book, very much a figure whose natural place is in history's footnotes. {CORRECTIONS} 96051300052