The corridor we are standing in bristles with ice. Thick layers of what turn out, on closer inspection, to be delicate, hexagonal crystals line the walls and ceiling. I and a handful of other visitors are in the basement laboratory of the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk; according to the red numbers of an LED panel, the temperature is -8 °C. After a few minutes, our presence – breathing, talking – has raised the temperature to -7 °C, and we are ushered back to the surface, where it is 35 °C, a day of dazzling Arctic sunshine and heat that makes the skin prickle. Here, as elsewhere in Russia, it has been a searing summer, turning large swathes of the landscape into kindling. The apocalyptic scenes in European Russia – thousands burned out of their homes, millions of hectares of crops destroyed, Moscow wreathed in smoke from smouldering peat bogs – have dominated news reports. But vast areas of the Far Eastern Federal District were damaged too.

The road from Kabul to Kandahar was once known as the Eisenhower highway. Built in the 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union competed peacefully for Afghan friendship, this US-funded 300-mile ribbon of tarmac was plied for two decades by lorries and garishly painted buses with no concern for security. Among the passengers were half-stoned Western hippies on the overland trail through Asia. Then came civil war and in 1979 the Soviet invasion. Ambushes turned the highway into a death trap until the victorious Taliban swept into Kabul in September 1996, eliminating all security problems once again. The only threat when I travelled the highway a few weeks later was colossal discomfort. After years of neglect, the road was close to collapse. Long stretches rippled like a corrugated roof, making travel in our hired minivan unbearable even at five miles an hour. What should have been a six-hour journey took 23.

For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Klod?brady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913, and Serge is two years older than the century. His problem is ‘a blockage’, ‘encumbrances’ in his bowel. ‘Morbid matter … Bad stuff … black bile: mela chole,’ the doctor says. ‘Your illness is not a thing; it is a process. A rhythm. Toxins are secreted around body, organs become accustomed and, perverted by custom, addicted.’ The deep link between spiritual state and bowel habit was well known to the ancients – viz the Aristotelian catharsis – but too often since then has been bypassed, though everybody knows in their gut of guts how real it is. What a relief then when the doctor diagnoses Serge’s condition, prescribing enemas, massage and many glasses of the disgusting local water. Not that any of it works.

The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 17

Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 17

That you were gay was something you managed to know about yourself and not know at the same time. I am almost certain, for example, that when I was warned by a priest at school that a boy who had parted his hair in the middle had by this act given a sign that he was homosexual (the only time the term was mentioned in those years), the priest himself had no clear and open idea that he himself liked teenage boys. (He would spend time in jail more than 20 years later for abusing teenage boys.) He would have had a way, learned for good reasons in adolescence, of keeping some of his actions and desires secret from himself. His sense of power and entitlement would also have meant that such crimes as he committed would most likely not see the light of day. The priesthood had, as far as he was concerned, solved his problems for him.

Seven years after his death, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s reputation is still a cauldron of discord. He would have enjoyed that. Steaming in the mix are the resentments of those he expertly wounded, the awe of colleagues at the breadth and depth of his learning, dismay at his serial failures to complete a full-length work of history, delight in the Gibbonian wit and elegance of his writing, and Schadenfreude over his awful humiliation in the matter of the Hitler diaries. In his lifetime, nobody was sure how to take him. Those who supposed they had his measure soon found that they were wrong. Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified Germany. But at the infamous Chequers meeting on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces.

With so many internal disagreements about loyalty, fidelity, sex, motherhood (for Tsiolkas, being a father is something you do, while motherhood defines you), it’s a pity the novel is so one-dimensional, everyone’s responses so similar, the language so uniform. Perhaps because they have it all ahead of them, two of the youngest characters, Connie and Richie, are the most vividly drawn. (‘Thank God for Connie and Richie,’ as Rosie says, though she is thinking about the babysitting.) In the teenagers’ chapters, the world is nuanced, uncertain, shifting; the grown-ups see mostly in black and white. A woman is a mother or a slut. You love your neighbours or you want them dead.

The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 16

Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 16

The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 15

Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 15

The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 14

Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 14

The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 13

Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 32 issue 13