ANNE DUCHÊNE

[Time of Desecration is] unremittingly cold, cruel, claustrophobic lubriciousness.

It is Moravia's first novel for eight years. His very first—we should remember—appeared in 1925. Several novels, in the almost uninterruptedly productive career since, have made honourable places for themselves; and many in the vast crop of short stories were legitimate and skilful peelings off the pain and panic and dissociation in modern minds.

Benign convention has accepted for a long time now that Moravia's novels have been becoming increasingly pornographic; but even the last, The Two Of Us, in 1972—chiefly a dialogue between a man and his over-large, over-active penis—was still slightly humanized by comedy, a little tenderness, and some glimpses, however unsurprising, of chicanery in the Italian film world. This new book allows no such relief….

Some wider metaphor may, loyally, be sought beyond the time-honoured écrasement of the bourgeoisie, which is really a pretty worm-eaten and hollow old statue now, and easy to knock over. The book's English title may suggest we have descended another rung or two in the Dantesque spiral since Time of Indifference (1929), one of the Moravia's better novels. The Italian title of the new novel, La Vita Interiore, from which the English publishers presumably decently withdrew, suggests Moravia may really want to lament that chaos is come again—on the basis of the nasty influences on silly Desideria, and her ludicrous reactions to them?—and darkness closing in over men's minds.

Yet on the evidence here, he is one of those engaged in putting out the lights all over Europe, and helping to rot the remaining fabric even while deploring its decay.