The Rebels, By Sándor Márai, trs George Szirtes

The four young men at the centre of Sándor Márai's novel, an extraordinary, unnerving tragedy played out over two days in May 1918, believe they are as good as dead. About to graduate from school in their remote mountain town, a place "wrapped in silence as in cotton wool", where the war "filtered through to them down channels no wider than a hair's breath", they fear it won't be long before they are sent off to battle. Abel, the story's narrator, is a doctor's son and an aspiring writer; Tibor, whom Abel secretly lusts after, is the son of a colonel; Bela's father is a rich merchant, and Eno's father is a crazed cobbler returned from battle where he acted as the colonel's hangman.

Forming a secret gang, the boys flout the conventions of the adults around them, committing the kind of petty crimes and pointless acts adolescents often find fascinating. There's an edge to what they do, though, brought about by their despair. The society they taunt, one that has groomed them to die, is so corrupt and corrupting that even in their gang they can't escape its effects.

Márai's writing is often poetic, expressing the boys' choking sense of confinement and helplessness as something close to the state of bliss that people who have narrowly avoided death often describe: a dreaminess, an overheated delirium acting as an anaesthetic. It's this state, of being alive but somehow already dead, that Márai seems to be engaging with; doom through disengagement rather than destruction.

The terrifying cobbler at one point comments, "people get over everything. That is providing they survive." This coming from a man who has survived the war but clearly been damaged by it, the reader is left wondering what "getting over something" might mean. Will the boys ever "get over" the experience of waiting to go to war and, if so, what will they have become?

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