[In the following review, Forster offers a mixed assessment of The Concert, asserting that “in among this baffling farrago of plot, counter-plot and inflated ‘message’ are passages of great delicacy and perceptiveness.”]

Sometimes called Albania's “loyal dissident”, Ismail Kadare occupied a contradictory position under Enver Hoxha. A favoured intellectual, even a cultural spokesperson, he was at the same time a persistent, though harassed, critic of crude socialist realism and of a political order that, as an “official” writer, he was obliged to uphold. Less secure under the succeeding regime of Ramiz Alia, he left Albania for Paris in the dying days of communist rule. Though he has returned, he appears not to have played the public role that some observers predicted.

In The Concert, Kadare uses “Aesopian” language to make a crisis in recent Albanian history—the break with China—the cover for an idiosyncratic critique of party and state, reintroducing characters from an earlier novel that dealt with the split from the Soviet Union. Begun in 1978, and published in Albania ten years later, The Concert yokes together disparate elements, from the sympathetic realist depiction of a group of bureaucrats and their families in Tirana through satirical portraits of the old bourgeoisie and new-style Sinophile opportunists to scenes of speculative fantasy set in China, or “China”.

For example, we are given, not so much the thoughts, as the entire phantasmagoric cerebral landscape of Mao Zedong, brooding like a barefoot cyborg over the fields of marijuana with which he plans to destroy European culture. In semi-delirium he plots to induce, in a sort of Opium War in reverse, the kind of “epidemic suggestion” or global delusion by which Tolstoy accounted for Shakespeare's unmerited reputation. This time it will erase from human memory those two “idiots”, along with Cervantes and Beethoven and everyone else.

These startlingly contrasted fictional worlds are brought together by the comings and goings of a diplomat, Gjergj Dibra, and a writer, Skënder Bermema, who may be taken to represent Kadare. Drafts of his stories, including a revision of Macbeth, all elaborating the theme of conspiracy, vary the fictional texture. But they are not successfully integrated into the main text, where they sit, lumpily undigested.

Albanian readers in the communist period appreciated Kadare's daring, if often allegorical, writing. The question here is what sense a wider readership can make of it, and how it stands up in the context of European writing and of Albania's heritage. Style and tone are particularly hard to judge in a text twice removed from its original, but both translations suggest a pervading inertness, a dogged but curiously affectless voice.

What surprises in the book's content is Kadare's blend of indirection and a strikingly overt treatment of politics: expulsions from the party and their effect on children's prospects, “autocritiques”, treated here with wild humour, or the milieu of the “professional revolutionary” represented by a Colombian “quoting Trotsky, Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong one on top of the other”.

In among this baffling farrago of plot, counter-plot and inflated “message” are passages of great delicacy and perceptiveness. They describe the daily life of the women—Silva Dibra, her colleague Linda, her daughter Brikena and her dead sister Ana—who have been involved in a nexus of relationships with the rather unreal men who fly about on “delegations” and “missions”. It is as if Kadare achieves his best effects when he is trying less hard, and this is a pity.