‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In Is Beauty Good there are many such voices. People talk to various listeners, even to silent ones. They talk to themselves, they resort to handwriting. The inanimate too may be granted a whimsical presence: a child’s tricycle, an antique chest. But, witty and ironic, the novel speaks with one voice of the things that speak, and don’t speak to us: ‘I drank carrot juice, beetroot juice. Disgusting. It seemed undignified, to be so desperate as to drink beetroot juice. Yet people do it without a second thought.’

It begins in Berlin by the Wall. It ends in Berlin – still before 1989 – in the Tiergarten Zoo, to the boom and roar and moan of animals. More often we find ourselves in mountains or an English garden, in the natural world, the loss of which Is Beauty Good so memorably laments.