SECOND READING

Number 26: The Radetzky MarchBy Joseph Roth (1932)

A JAUNTY MARCHING tune, the very symbol of Hapsburg military might, composed by Johann Strauss snr, marks time through the pages of Joseph Roth's stylish masterpiece chronicling the chaotic end of empire. Yet this dark, disturbing novel of eccentric beauty does far more than follow the experiences of a group of largely indolent characters - it evokes the disintegration of a complex world order finalised by an assassin's bullet that ultimately redrew the map of Europe.

Roth, a brilliant journalist and seer who saw, listened and understood more clearly than any of his contemporaries, including even Robert Musil, grasped that world's contrasting cultures, national identities, history and geography, while remaining alert to the dynamics of men and women, fathers versus sons and the powerful and the powerless. He also genuinely lamented the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a vast central European kingdom stretching from Hapsburg Austria to tsarist Russia, and desired its return.

"Of course, taken literally, [the monarchy] still exists. We still have an army . . . and we have an officialdom . . . But it's falling as we speak," observes Chojnicki, the outspoken landowner. "As we speak, it's falling apart, it's already falling apart! An old man [Emperor Franz Josef] with not long to go, a head cold could finish him off, he keeps his throne by the simple miracle that he's still able to sit on it. But how much longer, how much longer? The age doesn't want us any more! This age wants to establish autonomous nation states! People have stopped believing in God. Nationalism is the new religion."

The speech is a crucial moment in the narrative. It also presents the understated, always subtle and ironic Roth at his most openly polemical.

The lives of three generations of the Trotta family provide the fabric. Only Scott Fitzgerald evoked the mood and atmosphere of a specific age as exactly as Roth does here. The Radetzky March is Roth's longest book, with his largest cast of misfits and dreamers. It is also a 20th-century novel with roots in the 19th century. It is romantic yet never settles into a nostalgic celebration of the past. Two of the Trotta men, the District Commissioner, a study in repression, and his hapless son, Carl Joseph, later Lieutenant Trotta, a reluctant cavalry officer who loathes riding, are entrapped by a chance act of heroism that changed the family's destiny. Years earlier, the District Commissioner's father, had, during the Battle of Solferino in 1859, impulsively saved the emperor's life.

That unexpected, and unintentional, act of heroism - this is not a novel about heroes; heroics never much interested Roth, who died in alcoholic self-exile in Paris aged 44, and was fascinated by struggling, grasping, flawed humanity - changes everything for the family. "The Trottas were not an old family. Their founder had been ennobled . . . Fate had singled him out for a particular deed. He subsequently did everything he could to return himself to obscurity." Chance plays its part in the narrative. Roth, ever alert to nuance, creates a small group of officers, most of whom are in love with the glamour of army life, particularly the cavalry, with its dashing uniforms, magnificent horses and readily available women. His officers enjoy drinking, gambling, preening themselves and bantering loudly. Dying for the fatherland is not exactly a priority; war is merely an abstract concept. Lieutenant Trotta, whose carelessness causes the death in a duel of his only friend, Dr Demant, is aware that his uniform is his sole expression of self. Roth brilliantly sustains the irony to the final curtain. When news of the assassination of the emperor's nephew finally reaches their camp at the edge of the empire, the officers reckon it is merely a rumour.

This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon