White Blood, by James Fleming

A historical novel with the right kind of hero: virile, ruthless, adventurous

Charlie Doig, the hero of James Fleming's third novel, is a virile, ruthless man who has many adventures in his far-flung travels. This is how a character in a historical novel is supposed to act, and White Blood follows on from Fleming's literary excursion into the 18th century, The Temple of Optimism, and Thomas Gage, set in mid-Victorian times.

The new book is set before the First World War. Doig has a Russian mother and English father. The father dies of plague, contracted through a fleabite. At school in England, Doig becomes an amateur naturalist, taking odd revenge by killing insects. His mother tells him tales of life in the family mansion, the Pink House, and its estates near Smolensk.

Doig is penniless when he leaves school but because of his knowledge of Russian he quickly lands a job with Goetz, a famous finder of specimens for collectors and museums. The pair are soon off to Burma and Central Asia.

If this first part seems a little like a disjointed travelogue, it is a highly entertaining one. There is more than one kind of wildlife when an encounter with a quartet of prostitutes in Burma involves the use of a funnel and a lot of tiny eels. Exotic sex and the finding of rare species bring Doig to describe himself as being "in la-la land" - a phrase surely not in use in the 1910s.

When Doig travels to the Pink House, the novel deepens and takes wing. His cousin Liza is engaged to be married to a Polish count and war hero. Her relatives are very keen to see the marriage go forward as they are in enormous debt. Doig disobliges them all by falling in love with Liza and plots the removal of the count. The description of the estate and its inhabitants, the nearby village, and distant rumours of war and revolution, are all superbly handled. It would be a pity to reveal any more of the plot, but, soon enough, all hell breaks loose.

Fleming has said that he finds it easier to write of events imagined in the past, rather than to deal with the inchoate modern world. But is the Russian Revolution, and all that flowed from it, dead even now? After all, as Fleming reminds us, if there was one thing that its brutish moralists detested, it was a free and humane imagination.

William Palmer's 'The India House' is published by Vintage