Tom Stoppard's work has been notably generous with many commodities, from verbal wit to metaphysical ennui, but with one it's always been notably stingy. Bluntly, his characters have lacked strong personal feelings. A sort of rueful tristesse has, on the whole, been their dark night of the soul. It was in that mood that both the philosopher-hero of Jumpers contemplated the disloyalties of a wife he was supposed to love and, rather earlier, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shrugged and joked their way to their violent deaths. Something deeper was perhaps touched in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Stoppard's tale of a father and son separated by KGB malice; but only a bit, and briefly. You can't conceive of his people in any sort of ecstasy, whether of pleasure or pain. You can't imagine them exulting or howling or even hurting very much.

Or couldn't until The Real Thing, a...