In Hensher’s hands, though, we will believe almost anything anyone says while they are still speaking. He is a consummate ventriloquist. All the same, he does run on. Sometimes the blather is mesmerising, sometimes you wish he’d just shut up. For some six hundred pages, spanning whole lifetimes on two continents, he records in minute detail the kaleidoscoping conversations and relationships of two Sheffield families, the Sharifullahs from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the Spinsters next door – and their aunts, uncles, boyfriends, flatmates, flatmates’ friends, taxi drivers, hairdressers, work colleagues, and many, many others. On the way, he ventriloquises through the myriad puppets on his knee the voices of characters as diverse as a London banker’s wife, Bengali-speaking servants in Dhaka in the 1970s, a hopelessly self-deluded Italian student, the young millionaire owners of Fuck That Games (a video games company), a veiled Muslim woman on her honeymoon in Land’s End, a couple of foul-mouthed Cypriot barbers, any number of vile children from witches to violent bullies, and the Sharifullahs’ daughter, who eventually becomes, through her charity work, a baroness.

While the spectacle is spellbinding, it is hard to care deeply about any of these characters. What, indeed, in this age of rambling fictions, makes a reader care about the characters (whatever ‘care’ might mean)? Hensher does better than some. Arundhati Roy, for instance, the virtuoso Indian writer with whom he has been compared, also tells complicated stories with flashbacks about several generations of unravelling families, framed by political turmoil and brutality, yet, while Roy teaches us a multitude of things about Indian society and the violence in Kashmir, the human heart, the focus of all caring, remains a total mystery, and all hope of redemption or transformation fades. Hensher teaches us more about this enigmatic yet vital organ than Roy does, seducing us through deft shifts in linguistic register into sharing for a few pages a dazzling array of viewpoints. And transformation is sometimes possible in Hensher’s world – rarely, but it does happen. Even so, are there simply too many players in this drama for us to care about any of them more than superficially? Ironically, the metafictional game-playing that gives us access to the characters’ individual ways of seeing the world also underlines their role as puppets. Puppets have no hearts.

A couple of Hensher’s characters – Hilary’s son Leo and Aisha, the daughter of Hilary’s Bangladeshi neighbours – are set up to interest us in more complex ways. They are based, Hensher tells us, on Pushkin’s Tatyana and Eugene from Eugene Onegin: Aisha does indeed write Leo a letter confessing to an infatuation (although not quite the poetic masterpiece Tatyana’s was). Leo brushes her aside and then, years later, on meeting her again, shows a spark of interest, only to be rejected in his turn. However, Aisha and Leo are figures in a congested suburban landscape that we instantly recognise, leading lives so real in every scrupulously recorded particular that the reader has no need to imagine anything, becoming a mere spectator. Pushkin trusts us to share in the act of creation, allowing us to discover depths in ourselves while exploring fictional characters from a society that disappeared two centuries ago.

There are many intriguing thematic threads weaving in and out of the fabric of Hensher’s polyphonic performance. Our ventriloquist gets his dolls talking illuminatingly about what makes a nation, for instance. Indeed, it is surely one of the most civilised, most nuanced presentations of the problem of nationhood in these times of mass migration and instant communication yet attempted. Hensher does not just want us to consider the importance of knowing people who are not like us: he wants us to think in their language so as to change the way we see and understand.

Another major theme concerns whether it is class or race that divides us into hostile camps. Aisha, on her way up the social ladder to becoming a member of the House of Lords, thinks it is class. For most of the novel’s characters it looks like something with less of a Marxist ring: status. Most of those who seek status are dealt with harshly by the puppet-master.

Philip Hensher

On a less political, yet in some ways more cutting, level, The Friendly Ones confronts each one of us with the awful possibility that, like Hilary’s dying wife, Celia (his ‘booby-prize’, as he callously calls her), we too may well have made a ‘terrible mistake’ early in life only to discover that ‘the mistake, it’s your life’. Almost everyone with a name in this novel makes a terrible mistake at a pivotal moment when still quite young, especially, but not only, when choosing a husband, wife, or lover, perhaps echoing the mistakes Tatyana and Eugene made. However, in The Friendly Ones the mistakes are too specific to touch us deeply. One of Hilary’s sons catches the bus blown up by terrorists in Tavistock Square, for instance. A bad choice of bus. There you go.

Is there any redemption for our mistakes? Right at the novel’s end, there is a sort of coming together of all the factions and branches of the two central neighbouring families. This general merrymaking on Hilary’s hundredth birthday is pleasingly Shakespearean, as it’s meant to be – The Winter’s Tale was apparently the model. It’s amusingly artificial, reprising the party the novel opens with, but it looks like closure rather than redemption.

This is a fascinating performance, but the narrator talks too much. People do, of course, but The Friendly Ones is art, not life.