Why does an inspector from the Sanitation Department suddenly arrive at the pharmacy with orders to carry out an inspection? Why is

Why does an inspector from the Sanitation Department suddenly arrive at the pharmacy “with orders to carry out an inspection”? Why is the charming Austrian spa town being slowly cut off from the outside world? And why do all the guests seem to be Jews?
Blind to what is happening to them, desperately clinging to every scrap of hope and normality, they are slowly overwhelmed by their terrible fate – and eventually “sucked in” to “four filthy freight cars”. His celebrated novel Badenheim 1939, for example, starts on a spring afternoon as holidaymakers “gathered in the caf?nd devoured pink ice cream” An impresario is planning an arts festival. Yet despite “the brightly coloured baggage” and delicious pastries, the back-biting and flirtations, something is not quite right. Appelfeld has long drawn upon this horrifying, almost unbelievable, childhood in his fiction. And he eventually made his way to a transit camp in Italy (although “terrible people – corrupt and violent – preyed upon us all the way from the Ukraine”) before crossing by sea to Haifa He was still only 14 years old.

When he managed to escape, he hid in the forests for months like a mute animal and witnessed another child being hunted down by local peasants He found brief refuge as a servant in a prostitute’s hut. Anti-Semites took over his school and he was soon swept up into the system of ghettos, labour camps and forced marches His mother was killed. ‘In the summer of 1937,” writes Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, “life changed beyond recognition.” He was five years old, living in what is now Moldova. For instance, tragi-comic as the story of the Rector of Stiffkey is (mauled to death by a lion after being defrocked for associating with prostitutes), I would rather have read something about Dick Sheppard, the radio parson, who led the largest pacifist movement in Britain between the wars.But one can go on picking holes forever, finding fault (there’s a right old muddle about the difference between a constitutional suffragist and a militant suffragette), and still finish After the Victorians with a thrill of admiration for Wilson’s risk-taking, the extraordinary inclusiveness of his book, and for his seemingly inexhaustible ability to summon up characters from the past – such as Dr Crippen and Ethel LeNeve, “a Tristan and Isolde played out behind lace curtains”.For those of us privileged to watch A N Wilson at work in the British Library’s Humanities One Reading Room, assembling the materials for this project, disappearing under piles of books, hogging the photocopier, and chewing on sandwiches from a tiny lunchbox, it’s a pleasure to report that, by and large, he’s pulled it off.. Thus we are given plenty about Elgar, but nothing about Benjamin Britten; rather more than one can stomach about Rupert Brooke, but nothing on Sassoon or Owen; as for Virginia Woolf, her problem, apparently, was that “she had nothing to write about” – which rather flies in the face of all she had to say about war and peace, the position of women, and imperial patriarchy.Inevitably, individual taste plays a larger part than usual in the appreciation of a book such as Wilson’s. Wilson says that he’s written a portrait of the age rather than a formal history.

However, pursuing the fate of the Empire, central as that undoubtedly is, has led him to produce a book that contains too much political history and more detail than one wants about other parts of Europe in the early 20th century. In the process important aspects of British life are neglected.The treatment of the First World War is a case in point. Wilson, reasonably enough, shifts some of his focus to an analysis of the war in the East, demonstrating the significance of Turkey’s siding with Germany to Britain’s struggle for its imperial existence. Yet the war’s cultural, social and literary impacts, as well as an assessment of the conflict as a cataclysmic event in the experience of ordinary people, form a large gap in Wilson’s pages.Wilson’s judgments on the arts of the period are charmingly idiosyncratic, as one would expect. But this structural device doesn’t work as well as the overarching figure of Queen Victoria did in the first book. The book ends with Dean Acheson’s (rather overused) adage that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role.Britain’s Empire and imperial ambitions are the organising theme around which After the Victorians is arranged, and in its early pages we witness the splendour and pageantry of the Delhi Durbar at the beginning of Edward VII’s reign, which symbolised the historic might of British rule in India.