The History Man is a novel about dehumanization; behind the book is a strong visual analogy, of a flat, hostile landscape, not our good old friend, of multi-storey car parks, block buildings, blank walls, treeless spaces, run-down city scapes, a graffiti-scarred new university which could, if events require it, be well converted into a factory, a world in which it is hard to put in the person. The characters, too, are hard objects, and there is no entry into their psychology or their consciousness: they manifest themselves by their speech and their actions. There is one ostensibly sympathetic character, who speaks for humanism; she is a deception to the reader. The central figure, Howard Kirk, the radical sociologist who, four years after the revolutionary season of 1968, when onerous reality seems wonderfully to lift, tries to sustain his transforming passion in an inert world. But he believes that privacy...