Export the English if you want to have a good look at them, their absurdities and anxieties thrown into high relief against a foreign backdrop. It is the formula of Forster's A Room With a View and Woolf's The Voyage Out (in her exasperated début she transported them as far as South America), and countless novels before and since. Francis King's The Ant Colony is back on Forster territory, in Florence, just after the end of the war, where rubble is still piled round the Ponte Vecchio and the expatriate community is reassembling and dusting off the anecdotes—“What was it that Norman Douglas had said to him?” They are avid for “new blood”, which duly arrives in the form of innocent Jack (Yorkshire and Oxford, but much more Yorkshire) and Iris (upper-middle class, ex-ATS) who turn up to teach English at the Institute.

The education of Jack and Iris at the hands of “the colony” is of course the theme. Their separate adventures provide a guided tour of the Florence of camp tradition, mapped-out not in paintings or palaces of Florentines, but in these personaggi who have superimposed their own network of intrigue and gossip on the city. Some are grandly penniless, like Audrey Heaton, who scrapes a living on advances for unwritten books, reviews for the TLS (a touch implausible, that) and dunning richer friends, while she tends the shrine of her dead lesbian lover Johnnie. Others are wealthy, like Ivor Luce, who is also nearly young by the colony's standards, and who contemplates Jack (“A butch piece. With possibilities. Definitely”) in vampiric anticipation. Ivor urges Jack to “behave like an Italian”, but that's not exactly what he means: going native here is a matter of becoming one of the characters in the play of sex and patronage; learning the language means acquiring a fund of voyeuristic stories about Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Reggie Turner, Willie Maugham and “Percy Lubbock in Lerici.” And possibly adding your own contribution, canonized in whispers.

King, who was in Florence in the 1940s, has fun with his name-dropping characters, while carefully not dropping any names himself. He is disposed to be forgiving, at this distance: their snobbishness and their self-consciousness and seedy glamour do conceal some small pearls of wisdom, along the lines that moral black and white do not make up the whole spectrum. In one or two corners of the plot there is even room for pathos—particularly in the treatment of ancient Harry Archer, a failed painter tended in his decline by sixteen-year-old Franco who, according to the gossip, is a thief, but in fact sells himself in the Loggia and to save the old man's dignity pretends that the money comes from peddling Harry's shaky handiwork. Vice and violence take place off-stage, so that good humour can, on the whole, prevail. If you don't look too closely, what you see is a community of eccentrics.

Jack does rather better than Iris. Though on the face of it he's a great deal more gauche and vulnerable, those, it turns out, are his saving qualities. Yorkshire innocence survives unscathed (he loses his virginity to a brisk and obliging English nanny, who's very definitely not a member of the charmed circle), only his rough edges are smoothed by the disappointed but gallant Ivor. Moreover, browsing among the bookstalls, he comes on a copy of Coventry Patmore, and, we're told, “It was that volume which was fortuitously to propel him in the direction in which his career as a redbrick academic was eventually to meander.” (The syntax itself at moments takes on a leisurely, rootless flavour.) Jack is a lucky Jim, but Iris—precisely because she has connections and introductions galore in the colony—loses her innocence rather more thoroughly, thus illustrating the old fictional adage that men's sexual lives are educational episodes, while women take theirs personally. So in a sense the plot is as “period” as the setting. The darker implications serve mainly to spice the comedy, however. The only seriously wicked characters, and the only seriously good ones for that matter, aren't English in any case: the English, it seems, are saved for niceness and nastiness. King's Florence is a busy limbo where this version of the national character can flourish without encountering any resistance: he mocks his colonists, but colludes with them too, so that their world becomes the closed system implied in the title, comfortably pickled.