The English novel is regularly accused of being too quiet, too polite and too safe. It is often described in negative terms: it is unadventurous or unambitious. Francis King has written novels, such as Act of Darkness, to which none of these adjectives apply. They are all, however, appropriate in the case of The Ant Colony.

Jack, a young, diffident, working-class virgin, and Iris the ‘classy’ titled daughter of a famous mother, and also a virgin, arrive in Florence to teach English after the war. They spend a year acquiring experience and then leave, sadder and wiser. The circle they inhabit is the expatriate colony, which has the usual characteristics of expatriate communities: it is gossipy, bitchy, and disconsolate, there is a lot of sex of different varieties, and there is a suffocating sense of futility in the air. Its members are like tourists who have stayed too long, and run out of things to do and sights to see. They watch each other. ‘Here', says one of them, ‘all private lives are public ones.’

The novel moves slowly around a large cast of characters, many of them engaging, some of them sketchy, transferring its attention from Jack to Iris and back again. Jack pines for Iris, and makes a half-hearted pass at her, but in fact they do not see very much of each other over the year. At first everyone but them seems to be having an active sex-life, lesbian, gay or heterosexual, and they miss innuendos, mistake sexualities or overhear orgasmic cries without realising what they are. Iris, however, begins to spend her time with Dale Somers, a gigolo with a weakness for violence. He introduces her to sex. Jack, often lonely, spends his time with Ivor Luce, a middle-aged aesthete who would like to perform a similar service. Ivor eyes him before meeting him in a library: ‘A butch piece. With possibilities. Definitely.’ This is a refreshing voice disrupting the pervading languid tone of the novel, but it quickly becomes more subdued, and their friendship is purely platonic. Jack has to wait until almost the end of the novel before his inevitable deflowering. He is eventually seduced after a liberating swim by a convenient tourist who first had sex when she was 13. Francis King discreetly leaves the room, or the beach, before any of his characters start to make love. It might be more appropriate in some cases to stay there for the gory details. It seems odd to desert his characters when they are having experiences crucial to their development.

The characters around Jack and Iris slip and slide in their feelings for each other, sometimes in mid-conversation. A smile of ‘extraordinary warmth’ interrupts cold dislike. A wife despises and then pities and forgives her husband. People seem to be in the wrong relationships, feeling neither love nor hate for each other. They irritate each other but do not arouse passions. A man, losing his mistress, out of love with his wife and children, transfers all his affections to a stray dog he has rescued from being put down. The ones who come off well are the older ones, who retain their dignity, show bravery in small, unostentatious ways and are, above all, kind. These characters are likeable, but likeable characters are not enough to make this a satisfying novel. The Ant Colony does not seem to have quite made up its mind. It approaches, but never reaches, the sparkling, sophisticated malice of Mapp and Lucia, while it hints at a darker side which is never explored. Ian McEwan's The Innocent, as its title suggests, has a very similar hero, and The Ant Colony might have benefited from some dramatic happening to disturb the well-drawn but slightly staid picture it presents. There are a suicide and a broken nose at the end, but both are subordinated to a nostalgic mood of departure, which dominates the final chapters, and seems in retrospect to have dominated the whole story.