SOURCE: “Name-Droppers,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 7, 1991, p. 22.

In the following review of The Ant Colony, Sage examines King's treatment of his characters, especially Jack and Iris.

Export the English if you want to have a good look at them, their absurdities and anxieties thrown into high relief against a foreign backdrop. It is the formula of Forster's A Room With a View and Woolf's The Voyage Out (in her exasperated début she transported them as far as South America), and countless novels before and since. Francis King's The Ant Colony is back on Forster territory, in Florence, just after the end of the war, where rubble is still piled round the Ponte Vecchio and the expatriate community is reassembling and dusting off the anecdotes—“What was it that Norman Douglas had said to him?” They are avid for “new blood”, which duly arrives in the form...