I had invited an old friend, a raven-haired young lady (named in Debrett’s) of impossibly romantic tendency, who first exposed me to the film in, I’d say, about 1998 or ’99. It took a bit of selling, even then (and back then I thought I was Byron); but after not much more than a couple of minutes of the multi-Oscar-winner – about, to take just Michael Ondaatje’s main character, Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a pilot of dubious origin who is shot down in the Egyptian desert during the Second World War, knows the lines to every song he’s ever heard but not his own name, and may or may not have betrayed his colleagues to ze Chermans for the sake of love (we have no time for the true biography of László Almásy) – I was, of course, completely hooked.

Alexandra, alas, is unavailable (she works in theatre, natch), so I’ll be going with Harry – and as Harry’s guest, in fact. Harry and I were in Afghanistan together, in 2013, and, as he likes to say, I’ll never come to Dorset. (Don’t tell him: I’ve been several times, just not to visit him. He lives in Fulham, anyway.) But that film that Alex showed me has been with me for the better part of 20 years, now.

I applied to study Egyptology almost entirely on the strength of it, a fact I carefully concealed from cagey academic overseers at school and university. During my gap year in South Africa – just to be even more abysmally pretentious – I didn’t tuck things in a copy of Herodotus (‘the book he brought with him through the fire’), but in a Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford I would walk around listening to the movie’s famously aching – nay, plangent – Gabriel Yared soundtrack on a loop (like all Ondaatje books, the original itself is in any case full of music and singing). In Canada I bought a black leather blazer-style jacket from Banana Republic, although I drew the line at knee-length khaki shorts.

In the libraries of the Oriental Institute I found odd books on modern Egypt (gasp!), or at least more-recent explorations of the desert, and began to make my own trips – though actually seeing Egypt, perhaps predictably, was not really a course requirement. And when I fell out with my college it was the lonely-hero movies like The English Patient I returned to in the bitter evenings. I became well-versed in the admissions criteria for the Foreign Legion. And then – under the signature of my professor – I joined the Royal Geographical Society, as found, thinly disguised, in the EP novel:

‘In the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis…’

The RGS – right next door to the RAH – has some nice old copies of Almásy things (not all in English), as well as material on the Long Range Desert Group (cf. the famous picture of bearded, hard-eyed SOE types in duffel coats, that used to do the rounds of my regimental HQ) and more scholarly desert-exploration articles by the likes of Bagnold, Bermann, Ball and Hassanein Bey, which Ondaatje sought out in back numbers of the Journal.

And in my then mood, the romantic, antisocial, somewhere-on-the-spectrum explorer and lover of the desert’s solitude, whose happiest memory, as he tells his (supposedly) illicit inamorata, Katharine Clifton, is the time he travelled all day with a guide who said nothing until he pointed at the horizon and said “Faya”… well, it struck a loud, if none-too-subtle, chord.

After a meeting once with Ranulph Fiennes (I followed him round the bookshops of Oxford, between signings, until he told me that in Oman he would have killed me by now), he put me in touch with John Hare, who had just completed a long camel-backed Saharan crossing, and whose brain I wanted to pick about doing one through the long crescent of oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. I never made that journey (yet). But a flame had obviously been kindled.

My first copy of the novel, came, entirely fittingly, from the American University in Cairo bookshop: a well-annotated, typo-strewn Picador paperback reprint, with the price (I think) on the title page in blue biro, bought on my first trip, in 2003, in the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq – an interesting time to be a tall, blond, white man in an Arab capital. (The receipt is still inside: it cost 45 Egyptian pounds.) I later gave in and bought myself a first edition, on Charing Cross Road, which I’ve not opened. No doubt I have a clingfilmed ‘deluxe’ version of the movie somewhere, also.

The book, of course, is total poetry (if there were ever any grounds for criticism it would be that there’s too much ‘poetry’). In a wonderful deleted scene, available on YouTube, an old bedou tells Almásy something, which he translates to Katharine: “He thinks he’s been there – but the route he’s describing, well, he couldn’t survive the journey now; but he’s a poet, so his map is poetry.”

I’ve ever since been an enthusiastic reader of Saul Kelly, Justin Marozzi, and other writers on Herodotus, the lost oasis of Zerzura, and the ‘real’ Almásy, all of which led to a friendship with the freewheeling, polymathic writer Robert Twigger, to interview whom I ‘crossed the Sinai’ (I was on a bus) in 2009. Rob now lives in Dorset (ssshhhh…!), and his most recent travel book – on the Himalayas, following on from one on the Nile – was Book of the Month in Geographical magazine, the magazine of the RGS. In a nicely complementary kind of way, I’ve just this week been asked to write my first piece for that magazine.

Eventually, the chance arose to go to my own desert war, and so I leapt at it. But that was years ago now, and unexciting – and I survived, unharmed, unlike (the fictional) Almásy.

I remain ‘a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it.’ I still keep things I need in books (which means that I can never find them). I know both names for what that place is called, at the base of a woman’s neck. Beyond a weekend or two with HM Forces, I haven’t yet got round to learning Arabic, let alone Hungarian, or several of the other languages that Almásy spoke (my two brothers speak a little, though I bet they can’t describe a mountain that looks like the shape of a woman’s back); but I can name some of the winds Almásy/Ondaatje describes, and tell their stories. I often listen to the Yared soundtrack. In fact, Benny Goodman’s ‘Wang Wang Blues’ was one of the first things that I played my child when she was born. Nor can I give her (or anyone else) a bit of plum without informing them that it’s a ‘very plum… plum.’ We were in Brighton, the other week, at the aquarium, to celebrate her turning one, and I found myself humming Lorenz Hart’s original words to ‘Manhattan’, ‘before they were cleaned up.’

I’ve watched the film at least a dozen times, now, and read the novel maybe half a dozen. I’ve given copies of both DVD and book as gifts, and indeed the movie-script on one occasion. And despite the fact that I own several copies, it’s one of a number of books – among those by a small number of literary favourites, like Chatwin, Coetzee, Golding, Dyer, Sebald, Hitchens – that, if I see it in a charity shop, I feel I ought to rescue, simply because it’s wrong that it should be there.

A few years and/or rewatches back, I realised that the day the ‘ENGLISH(?)’ patient is introduced to us is, by the notebook of the interrogating officer, my birthday.

In July, The English Patient won the Mother of all Bookers (or whatever this go round was called). We all know books mean many things to many people, and can have major real-world repercussions, on personal and even national levels. But amid all the renewed plaudits for Ondaatje’s classic novel, and the obvious, widespread awareness that it’s a tale packed full of questionable characters, traumatised and very literally scarred by conflict, it suddenly occurred to me that, given a long-enough trajectory, and alongside several other factors, it seems entirely plausible The English Patient is the reason that I went to war.

What would Ondaatje think of that, I wonder? My guess is he’d probably be horrified.

Buccmaster believes the old gods built the Roman roads and talks about ‘angland’ in a time when much of the population has only just finished being Danish. He has no truck with ‘cyngs’ and does not answer Harald’s call to Hastings. But when ‘geeyome the bastard’ arrives with his punitive taxes and rapacious knights, Buccmaster finds himself inspired to launch a violent rebellion against legal, financial and cultural annihilation.

History will not permit that he succeed, of course, so perhaps it does not much matter that Buccmaster is delusional, cowardly, and generally a disastrous leader. But his political objections are entirely legitimate, not least regarding a people’s access to their native language: ‘all that we is is bean tacan from us’. It has been a long time since Buccmaster’s descendants had cause to view themselves as victims of a conquest, but this remarkable feat of literary sympathy puts us right back in his apocalyptic vision of the end times for ancient England.

Rather more recent British history repeats itself in Randall (Galley Beggar Press 317pp £11), Jonathan Gibbs’s scathing pseudo-memoir of the Young British Artists and the art market under Cool Britannia. In a parallel artiverse where Damien Hirst died in the late 1980s, Ian ‘Randall’ Timkins has taken the London contemporary scene by storm, selling ‘holographs’ to the rich and famous derived from their own used toilet paper. He and his circle hang out in the pubs around Goldsmiths, attend events they ‘affect to despise’ and say profound things like, ‘There’s only two things you can do with art: make it, and buy it.’

Randall and his retinue occupy a milieu that’s equal parts Geoff Dyer and Bret Easton Ellis, and if the overall tone is just a fraction too refined for a City-boy narrator whose idea of culture was once a ‘signed and framed’ poster of Cindy Crawford, it’s a credit to Gibbs’s writing (and the YBAs) that you don’t need to have paid any conscious attention to the art world over the last twenty years for all of this to still feel familiar. If you can only put up with the slightly obnoxious characters, in fact, Randall is ideal for those who already dismiss most contemporary art as just so much Merda d’artista.

Aaron Thier’s The Ghost Apple (Bloomsbury 289pp £16.99) belongs to the more full-blown variety of satire. Tripoli College, a fourth-rate New England liberal arts institution – established for the betterment of ‘Indian Scholiasts’ – has been hit hard by the financial crisis, thanks largely to its overexposure to the company that manufactures Monopoly money. The college forms a new ‘partnership’ with Big Anna® Brands, a snack-food corporation, the ethical commitments of which include ‘the introduction of clean Human Power™ plow technology’ on its Caribbean plantation estates. One of these is the island of St Renard, where Tripoli’s ‘Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture’ enables politically engaged students of all creeds and colours to experience life in a Big Anna® republic.

With his merciless spoofing of course-listing gobbledygook and ‘brand history’ bullshit, Thier’s hectic assemblage of prospectuses, slave narratives, ‘Scandal Vulnerability Assessments’ and insane (but basically verbatim) Victorian health advice marks him out as a potential successor to the late lamented Tom Sharpe, and reaches a new high – which is to say low – for the satirical campus novel.

In Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character (Jonathan Cape 234pp £14.99) a young woman from Delhi comes into adulthood at the turn of the millennium, amid a human geography of cyber-boom and rampant development but also abysmal poverty, corruption and obsession with the country’s nuclear neighbour. One of a generation of schoolgirls who were told that they would be ‘the future of India’ but still find it unsafe to go out at night without ‘a man and a car or a car and a gun’, she sidesteps her aunt’s incessant attempts to marry her off and begins a turbulent physical relationship with an ‘ugly’ young man with whom she makes eye contact one day in a busy restaurant. He is the first person she has met who lives on his own, and he becomes her guide to parts of the city that have been thus far inaccessible.

Although the story is not exactly a happy one, the boldness of our protagonist is redeeming: in a setting one expects to be peopled with trapped or defeated women, her determination to forge her own genuine, personal experiences (however painful) is important. Kapoor’s prose, though, is a bit over-wrought and self-consciously modernist in places, and her whistle-stop tour of what should be the seamier aspects of the Indian capital occasionally seems to be ticking boxes (‘Lutyens’ Delhi’; ‘monumental grandeur’) for the ‘international’ audience.

In The Scatter Here is Too Great (Jonathan Cape 203pp £14.99), Bilal Tanweer does a better job of maintaining the flavour of something from another culture. Nine interlinked stories – focusing, in threes, on ‘A Writer in the City’, an old communist poet and a young man who steals cars from defaulting bank customers – orbit at various distances around a bomb blast at Cantt Station in central Karachi. In delivering these disparate viewpoints and dimensions of big-city life, Tanweer purposefully encourages an element of narrative opacity and incoherence. But although each individual strand is not without interest, no one section is particularly substantial or rewarding, and the book as a whole struggles to generate much momentum. Ondaatje-esque reflections appear here and there in support of Tanweer’s approach – ‘True stories are fragments. Anything longer is a lie, a fabrication’ – but, bluntly put, this collection could have done with a little more fabricating.

No such complaint could possibly be levelled at Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (Picador 555pp £16.99). ‘As a child,’ announces one of his Sebaldian co-narrators, ‘I maintained the expectation that obscure and difficult things would be discussed.’ Rahman satisfies that expectation in spades and with considerable control and polish. On one level, this is the story of two boys from different sides of the tracks and, indeed, from different sides of what used to be East and West Pakistan, who meet at Oxford in the late 1980s and then go on to work in high finance until one loses interest, retrains as a human rights lawyer and ends up in Afghanistan.

On another level, this book is a colossal investigation of the difference between seeing and knowing and understanding, taking in geopolitics, the banking crisis, black swans, NGOs, game theory, the British education system, cartography, war, primatology, (post-)imperialism, Christopher Hitchens, carpentry, Glyndebourne, translation, naval pennants, cognitive sciences, literature, black holes and Bath Olivers. Deeply insightful and limitlessly quotable, this is the kind of book every novelist dreams of writing and no first-timer should ever have had the chutzpah to attempt. As Rahman’s own narrator says, somewhat flagrantly: ‘nothing in his account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse.’

The same cannot be said of Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood (Serpent’s Tail 232pp £11.99). One drought-ridden summer John Cole shuts up his bookshop, gets lost driving out of London, breaks down and ends up being invited into an unofficial lunatic asylum, the occupants of which, for some reason, believe they were expecting him. He stays a week. Why? He is frustrated, even scared, by his new companions (Perry is good at the tiny details of mistrust and uncertainty); he thinks they are all lying to him; they are. But he doesn’t leave. Is he perhaps there for his own treatment? We are not vouchsafed an explanation.

Thanks to the litter of symbols and portents (think Henry James rewired by Murakami, or Virginia Woolf directing a sequel to The Village), After Me Comes the Flood consistently feels like it’s about to have a lot going for it. But there’s ultimately no pay-off, leaving the impression that it was all just an exercise in atmosphere.

None of that airy ambiguity in Katherine Faw Morris’s Young God (Granta Books 195pp £12.99). When her skeezy mother dies falling into a ‘witch-tit freezing’ river, trailer-park teenager Nikki decides to take control of her life and sets about making something of herself – specifically, a drug dealer. In two hundred short, violent and often unpleasantly sexual pages Nikki goes about her emotionally lobotomised progress, smoking Kool menthol cigarettes (‘the best thing that’s ever been in her mouth’), shaving herself like a porn star and responding to should-be major life events with a perfunctory ‘Oh’.

The basic so-what-ishness of the ending is perhaps unavoidable, given the context. But Morris’s punchy and unwavering style is absolutely of a piece with her unforgiving environment of post-Palahniuk white-trash girl-power – with guns. And fuchsia end-papers.

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For Literary Review