The novel as interrogation has turned out to be more than experiment; it is as natural a product of war, the fixed trial, as it is of personal guilt and self-defence. Psychoanalysis, sociology, case-histories and the huge bureaucracy of files and records train the novelist for the techniques of inquisition and tempt him away from the private graces on which we contrive, as best we can, to live. Not only are we now watched by Big Brother in what Heinrich Böll (in his new novel for which he will get the Nobel Prize this year) calls 'the achievement-oriented society': this society has produced innumerable Little Brothers who have us taped as well. This is awkward news for novelists who cling to their old omniscience: but Böll has seen a satirical and romantic compromise in interrogating the interrogators. [Group Portrait with Lady] is an exhaustive series of...