THIS is the first part of an enormous trilogy called The Writing on the Wall, aka The Transylvanian Trilogy. Its author, whose dates were 1873-1950, was a Hungarian count, and plainly much of the material is autobiographical, or at least coloured by personal experience. Set in Hungary and Romania early in the century, it offers a whole social panorama in which the Hungarian nobility show up badly - selfish, dissipated, trivial and racially arrogant. The trilogy has been acclaimed as a masterpiece, but while its picture of a largely vanished society is often fascinating, the writing is undistinguished stylistically (though that may be partly the fault of the translation) and terribly prolix. Volume 2, apparently, goes on to the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina which led ultimately to the first World War.