The Escape by Adam Thirlwell

Here, the hidden man does not emerge with a Beretta pistol and Thirlwell, unlike Kelly, does not reinvent his chosen genre, much as you sense he would like to. But there is dubious fun to be had nonetheless.

Raphael Haffner is the man in the wardrobe, a haplessly charming 78year-old former banker of LithuanianJewish extraction who has grown up in London and had business success in New York. He is "lustful, selfish, vain — an entirely commonplace man", and has come to an Alpine spa town to reclaim the villa his late wife has left to him in her will. It is the last year of the 20th century: "after the era of the spa as a path to health, and before the era of the spa as a path to beauty", in one of Thirlwell's neat turns of phrase.

The couple at it are Zinka — a young Romanian who proves strangely susceptible to Haffner's pitiful charms, later penetrating him with a lubricated candle — and her boyfriend Niko.

Also at the spa are Frau Tummel, a married German 55-year-old who soon gives Haffner a blowjob; Viko, a masseur-cum-fixer, who soon gives Haffner a handjob; and later, Haffner's grandson, Benjamin, a hip-hop fan with a strong Jewish faith.

The most vivid presence, however, is Haffner's own parade of memories. Between sexual encounters and inklings of mortality, he reviews his Jewish childhood in north London, war in North Africa, banking triumphs, the affections of his wife, his fondness for Chinese food, jazz, cricket, etc.

Thirlwell's admiring narrator — apparently a friend 50 years his junior, ie Thirlwell's age — is keen to stress that our protagonist is a sort of emblem of the 20th century, legendary in his lustfulness. He employs adjectives such as "Haffnerian" to describe his hero's actions.

What is Haffnerian? In one sense, it is a combination of qualities that Haffner recalls being applied to Cole Porter and would like to apply to himself: "Knowledge, Spunk, Individuality, Originality, Realism, Restraint, Rascality & Maturity". He only has a problem with that last one: "The greatest education possible, thought Haffner, would not lead its citizens into an age of responsibility but instead would escalate them to the rarefied heights of dazzling, starlit, spangled immaturity". This is how he has got away with such a carefree approach.

But in a more vivid sense, "Haffnerian" means a bit Pnin-ian, a bit Rabbit-like and a bit Portnoy-esque. It means a literary construct that Thirlwell, an All Souls Fellow and protegé of the sex-obsessed Oxford academic Craig Raine, enjoys principally for the way it permits him to allude to other authors, ie rip them off. When Thirlwell goes "Oh Haffner!" perhaps he believes he is being heartfelt and Pushkinian but it comes across as an undergraduate affectation.

That said, I enjoyed this more than Politics, his supposedly shocking debut — which read like Milan Kundera writing one of those fantasy letters to Penthouse. But The Escape is best when Thirlwell focuses on real life (for which he has an exacting eye). A little time away from academia would do him the power of good.

Oh, and if you haven't already, look up Trapped in the Closet on YouTube.

Synposis by Foyles.co.uk

Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married? Or Jewish? When was he ever attached? There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all. In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner is seeking a cure, redress, more women; and ignoring the will of his wife. He is there to claim her inheritance: a villa on the outskirts of a forgotten spa town. But Haffner never does what he is told. On his arrival in the town, he has checked into the spa hotel - and tried to develop two affairs: a mildly successful affair with a younger woman whose breasts are lavish, and a much less successful affair with an even younger woman, whose breasts are the smallest he has ever known. And, intermittently, he has tried to secure the paperwork for the villa he never wanted. But gradually, in the tribulations of bureaucracy, he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it. There are two character notes to Haffner: he is an egotist, and he adores women. A mediocre man, but a man of singular appetite. And so it is that, harried by his family, pursued by his women, menaced by bureaucrats, negotiating with the mafia, riven by his memory of the dead and of the missing, Haffner endures his many humiliations, as he tries to orchestrate his final escape, in the forgotten center of Europe. Through the story of his couplings and uncouplings, emerge the stories of Haffner's Twentieth Century. How can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history? That has been the problem of Haffner's life. How do you remain a libertine? A novel about the fall of empires, and the beauty of defeat, "The Escape" is a swift, sad farce of sexual mayhem.