Novels like Polonaise usually die at the outline stage. In skeletal form they impress everyone, not least the author; but as the appalling difficulty of actually writing them gradually emerges, there is a tendency to turn to other projects. Also, they fall uncomfortably between two stools: more than just another novel, but distinctly less than the masterpiece one will write some day. But there is a lingering attachment to the material—always a feeling that it could somehow be pushed and prodded into that vital inevitability which was promised in the original conception. So sometimes the writer buckles down to it.

Piers Paul Read has buckled down to it, and produced a novel not without conviction. It is about a writer, which is difficult enough; but much more so when the writer is a decayed Polish aristocrat involved in Communist politics between the wars. Stefan Kornowski is also...