Coming of age while the world falls apart

Fiction:May 1918: war has become a way of life. A group of young boys in a provincial town in Hungary are about to graduate.

Their future careers may go no further than a brief experience of battle, if even that. Their dreams are not dominated by heroic gestures. Indeed they engage in a daring set of scams and schemes, games with an edge, in an attempt to defy their doubts, themselves, each other and anyone else. Most of all they are determined to defy the adult world that is beckoning, albeit from a distance. Yet again, the gifted Hungarian writer, Sándor Márai, author of Embers, speaks from the grave. The Rebels, first published in 1930, a coming-of-age book with a difference, is the third of his novels to dazzle a new generation of readers.

The novel is remarkable for its depth of characterisation, for its collection of sharply drawn individuals. Márai, a sophisticated artist of ideas and themes shaped by the dying fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, enjoys setting the scene and describing the gestures, the slightest nuances.

Social class is an element here, as the boys hail from contrasting backgrounds. One of them confesses late in the book: "I would have liked to be your friend. But I was always afraid that you'd tell me off for something. I mean, you did once. On account of the knife and fork." So the cobbler's son, as well as the son of the grocer, indulge in secrets with the sons of the doctor and the career soldier.

Embers was originally published in Budapest in 1942, and its belated English translation in New York in 2001 (and in London the following year) caused the kind of sensation of which publishers dream. In Embers, two former friends, once intimate but long estranged by an act of betrayal, meet again after 41 years, during which the old wounds have continued to fester. Their dignified, if theatrically choreographed, confrontation takes place over the course of a lengthy formal dinner and the even longer night that follows. The setting is a castle, home to the reclusive general who has lived in the Carpathian mountains with only his bitter memories for company.

The third presence at the dinner table is the ghost of the woman they both loved. The dialogue soon becomes a monologue. Embers is an atmospheric performance, detached in its eloquent anguish, evocative of another time and, with it, another culture: that of the central European world of which Márai was a product.

He was born in Kassa in 1900 and became a major writer, publishing more than 20 books. His life wasn't easy. He opposed fascism and somehow survived the second World War in Hungary, only to be driven from his home by the communists in 1948. Eventually, having spent some time in Italy, he settled in the US. But he was never to find peace and committed suicide in 1989, in San Diego, southern California - tragically oblivious to the fall of the Berlin Wall in the same year.

Embers possesses an eerie perfection. It is one of those novels that stalks the reader while reading it, and then remains in the memory. Late in 2004, another, very different novel from Márai's middle period was published in English. Conversations in Bolzano tells the story of the life and times of Casanova, serial lover and raconteur. Or rather, Casanova tells his own story through a series of monologues. Not the most profound of works, but Márai, for all the apparent cynicism of his knowing anti-hero, does succeed in writing an analysis of the plight of a man doomed never to find satisfaction in love. As a novel, though, it never approaches the allure of Embers.

The Rebels is an earlier work, bizarrely jaunty, even wayward, but also subtle. The writing excites; it is elegant, languid and almost subversive. Above all, Márai misses nothing. It is as if he has watched these people very closely; he probably knew them, perhaps he was one or all of them. It is a pleasure as well as a test. Is it possible to understand these boys or even to like them? Well, questions such as those must be answered by the individual reader, but it is difficult not to identify with the boys and that is probably as Márai intended. From its opening pages, the book gives the impression of being far closer to Embers than to Conversations in Bolzano.

The theme of war is there. Initially it seems that Márai may have written the Hungarian version of All Quiet on the Western Front. The teenage boys - no longer children, yet not quite men - are waiting for war. But the shrewd, intuitive narrative develops quite differently, and consistently surprises. Its edge keeps any trace of nostalgia well at bay. War has already asserted itself in their lives:

There had been fifty of them in the fourth grade. Only seventeen remained to graduate. The war, of which they never spoke, silently took its toll of their numbers, secretly, half- unnoticed, as it tends to do in such remote nooks of life, even in a grade at the middle school of a provincial town. When war broke out they were entering fifth grade and there were still fifty of them. Now, four years later, only seventeen remained to graduate. Many of them simply failed to reappear. The peasant boys went home to take their fathers' places . . . Many more just failed to attend without telling anyone why . . . perhaps they had died. Many did indeed die, and their bodies were borne out with flags of mourning and wailing choirs. Almost a million had died on the front in those years, it was said. Or was it two million?

Later, in a similar reportage-like sequence, the town, we are told, "has become accustomed to the war in the way one can get used to old age, the thought of death, to anything at all". Elsewhere, as the boys get further enmeshed in elaborate lies and acts of theft, they fall under the spell of a touring actor and the tone turns more playful. The actor, with his fear of ageing and flair for comedy, allows Márai free rein in creating a marvellous devil of sorts. With his elaborate tales and deceptions he encourages the boys to fall deeper into their pit.

Each boy has his own problems: "Bela was as terrified of his father as simple people are of natural disasters", while another, the younger son of Col Prockauer, becomes a love object and is, "for the gang, that mysterious being, the epitome of all physical perfection." A less beautiful boy, Abel, the doctor's son, has provided the only object of love for his spinster aunt, who now faces the reality of losing him to adolescence.

The actor understands all, life has taught him well: "He talked like someone who had come home after a long day, put on his dressing gown, and felt comfortable in his own skin." But the boys feel anything but comfortable. Like an old-style cabinet of curiosities, The Rebels hits on many truths. To read it is an experience that leaves one fully alert and interestingly uncomfortable - exactly as the playfully deliberate Márai intended.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times Eileen Battersby

The Rebels By Sándor Márai Translated by George Szirtes Picador, 278pp. £12.99