[In the following review, Mantel finds After Hannibal uneven in structure and character and overly formal in language.]

Barry Unsworth's latest novel [After Hannibal] is a sad comedy of cheats and fools, a story of unbounded beauty and blighted hopes, of multiple and layered betrayals, "a regression of falsehoods and deceptions going back through all the generations to the original agreement, God's pact with Adam." Its setting is the Umbrian countryside, "the hills that Perugino and Piero della Francesca looked at," and the little hill towns with their art treasures and their frequently bloody history. What lies beneath the promise of the spring landscape, the poplars gently unfurling, the peach trees in bud? The answer is there in the place names: "Sepoltaglia, burial ground, Sanguineto, where the blood ran, Ossaia, place of bones."

Mr. Unsworth's characters are linked by the road that runs past their houses. "They are called strade vicinali, neighborhood roads…. Dusty in summer, muddy in winter, there are thousands of miles of them wandering over the face of rural Italy. When such a road has reached your door it has no necessary further existence." These roads are marked on maps, but the maps make no distinction between broad highways and rutted tracks, between roads that are useful and roads that are merely notional. The cost of their upkeep falls on those whose doors they pass. It is a dispute about the maintenance of a wall adjoining one particular strada vicinale that embroils a British couple named Harold and Cecilia Chapman in a quarrel with the Checchetti family, who are just as coarse and cunning as peasants in literature can possibly be.

Not that the reader is on the side of the English couple. Harold is a blusterer, his wife a bore. Their other neighbors are a strange German, Ritter, who has suffered a mental breakdown and lives in isolation in the hills above; an ingenuous American couple, the Greens, soon to become the dupes of a British "project manager" who will wreck their house instead of renovating it; two Italian homosexuals, whose personalities are hardly established before the younger one runs away, having first persuaded his partner to sign over the house to him.

There is also the morose figure of Monti, an Italian historian whose wife has recently left him. Here is a personal betrayal to add to the historical betrayals on which Monti's mind dwells. His function in the plot is that of matchmaker between the past and the present. The history he teaches his students seems old-fashioned, quaint and anecdotal, and the reader may not have much confidence in his judgment. Did Gibbon really find the era of ancient Rome "a period as remote from him in its manners and morals as the time before the Flood"?

In addition to the strada vicinale there is another link between these characters. It is Mancini, the cunning and enigmatic lawyer whom most of them find reason to consult. Mancini seems to be of no particular age. Has he a beginning and an end? His clients, with their childlike notions about justice, merely furnish him with entertainment. He seems to be in possession of some truth—but what is the truth Mr. Unsworth offers us? Houses fall down. They are razed. Earthquakes and enemies blitz them. We are all exposed, sooner or later: "no walls left standing to shelter our illusions."

After Hannibal does not earn the right even to this glib, routine pessimism. Mr. Unsworth himself lives in Umbria. He writes tenderly about fig trees and nightingales, frescoes and stained glass, and particularly about the lovely light of the area: "The experience of it was like the experience of understanding something." Sometimes he seems to be describing the terrain just to cheer us up—after all, there is not much in the characters or plot to please us—and at these times the novel reads like a very superior guidebook. Elsewhere, descriptions carry a heavy weight of symbolism, and this makes the writing seem inauthentic. When Mr. Unsworth's characters have a crisis, they go off to view a ruin; under stress, they urgently examine an altarpiece.

Occasional flashes of acid observation are welcome. (Harold Chapman "was given to the counting of blessings, which in practice meant the listing of assets.") And Mr. Unsworth writes well about how we hate the people we cheat, how betrayal changes the nature of the past by poisoning memory. The interplay of the individual stories is neat and ingenious, but the structure does not allow narrative tension to build.

Mr. Unsworth's intimate knowledge and delight in his territory gives the prose life and beauty, but expatriation may also be undermining him. He has never been a writer who followed the fashion; with admirable integrity, he has plowed his own furrow. But it isn't wise to become estranged from how people in the street use your native language; you should know about it, even if you don't use the knowledge. This is not just a matter of vocabulary, it's a matter of rhythm and speed. In this novel, Mr. Unsworth's idiom is stiff, like that of an old-fashioned schoolmaster. Studied, literary inversions are dotted throughout the text. ("Those we have pardoned do we always underrate?") Some readers may value the elegance of expression, but when this degree of formality is applied not just in narrative but in dialogue, the effect is to make the characters into a ventriloquist's dolls.

There is, too, a problem of register. Ritter, the German, contends with welling memories of a World War II atrocity in which his father was implicated. Blemish, the project manager, is—as his name suggests—a vehicle for broad farce. It is possible that one story could accommodate Ritter's anguish and Blemish's silliness, but it is surprising that an author writing his 11th novel should toss them together so casually, without seeing that something strong and cunning in terms of authorial control must be exercised if one is not to negate the other.

Mr. Unsworth may be a victim of his own recent triumphs. Sacred Hunger, his novel about the slave trade, won the 1992 Booker Prize in Britain and was greeted by many critics as an instant classic. It is a massive work, very different from its quicksilver successor, Morality Play, which was a finalist for the Booker in 1995. Scorned by the imperceptive as a medieval whodunit, Morality Play was a near-perfect novel, with a diamond's glitter and a diamond's hardness: a profound meditation on the nature of justice and the transforming power of art. By contrast, After Hannibal seems a book made up of other books: the commonplace book, the scrapbook.