The Sandpit by Nicholas Shakespeare

Robert Harris once wrote that writing a book which was both a thriller and a literary novel is “a difficult trick but in my book the greatest to bring off.” It was something Graham Greene managed at least half-a-dozen times, and Nicholas Shakespeare now does it with The Sandpit. There are echoes of Greene, also of Conrad and Le Carré. Yet these influences have been absorbed as good writers always absorb the influence of their predecessors and go beyond it to make something that is wholly their own, striking an individual note.

The novel is set in Oxford, evocatively described. John Dyer, once a journalist, now a one-book author, has returned there with his 11-year-old son Leandro, after many years in Brazil. He spends days in one of the university libraries researching the early encounters of the Portuguese with the Tupi and other tribes, while Leandro attends the Phoenix Preparatory School as Dyer himself did 40 years ago.

Much in the school is as it was in Dyer’s day – even the sandpit where a bully once buried a model aeroplane Dyer had made is still there. But the clientele has changed. The parents he meets on the touchline at football matches are no longer members of the English professional middle-class. They are the new mega-rich Russian oligarchs, financiers moving invisible money around the world and shorting the markets.

There are a couple of exceptions. One, a contemporary of Dyer’s at the Phoenix, is a