During World War I, Gerhardie was posted to the British Military Attaché in the newly renamed Petrograd, where he witnessed the revolution close up. Later he would serve in the British Military Mission to Siberia, taking part in the ultimately farcical intervention by the Western Powers to attempt to unseat the Bolsheviks. This would feature in "Futility"; his long return journey from the East — via Singapore, Colombo and Port Said — would appear in his second novel, "The Polyglots." On his return he began study in Worcester College, Oxford, where he would write the first book in English about Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, and also his first novel.

Described by Katherine Mansfield as a "living book ... one can put it down and it goes on breathing," and published with a preface by Edith Wharton ("Mr. Gerhardie's novel is extremely modern; but it has bulk and form, a recognisable orbit, and that promise of more to come that one always feels latent in the beginnings of the born novelist"), "Futility" is perhaps the most accessible Gerhardie novel. On the frontispiece, Gerhardie wrote, "The 'I' of this book is not me." With a narrator whose life paralleled that of its author, perhaps this was a necessary distinction to avoid the eternal conflation of fiction and autobiography.

The title of the first section, "The Three Sisters," is an obvious nod to Chekhov. The narrator is in a Russia of beauty, adrift in the dizzyingly complex family life of Nikolai Vasilevich, his three young daughters and his longtime companion whom he has abandoned for a young lady, Zina, who brings her own entourage of eager dependents. These aspiring dependents regard Vasilevich, who also has an official wife in Moscow, as a wonderful prospect of riches, drawn from what is most likely to be, financially speaking, utterly draining mines in Siberia.

Portentous historical events collide with this strangely romantic mis en scene. History and the points of the narrator's love life seem equally absurd. Gerhardie combines neat satire on British military culture and Russian obscurantism, as the expectations of the admiralty are confounded by the Russian incomprehension of their ways. In the final sequence, the narrator throws away what seems like an unreal, futile existence in Oxford to travel back to Vladivostok and proclaim his love to Nina, the loveliest of the three sisters. In Vladivostok, however, his romantic aspirations are utterly frustrated and now it is Oxford that seems, from a distance, to be a hub of pulsating life.

"The Polyglots" is the story of a spectacularly egocentric young officer, George Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who, on a military mission in the Far East is dragged into the orbit of a highly eccentric Belgian family, the Vanderflints, a collection of nymphomaniacs, obsessives, paranoiac satyrs and crossdressers. Once again, events of historical significance and banal triviality mingle, both seeming equally absurd. Rather than the tendency of some authors to create "character" by piling on detail, Gerhardie gives the cast of his novels a recurrent phrase which managed to pinpoint them in the mind forever. Diabologh is forever insisting to other characters that he is "good-looking ... you think I'm conceited? I think not."

"Doom" is a work of the utmost strangeness. It begins with the postmodern avant la lettre touch of the narrator Dickin reading an account of his involvement with two beautiful sisters to Lord Ottercove, a figure inspired by Canadian financier, politician and press baron Lord Beaverbrook, and afterward walking into a taxi with one of the sisters who has featured in the narrative. Dickin, whose name is constantly confused with Dickens, is brought into Ottercove's circle. Playing an increasingly large part in events as the story progresses is the sinister Lord de Jones, the major proponent of a scheme to increase global food production by sealing volcanos (thus increasing the Earth's heat, and thus improving the growth rate of crops), and, it emerges, more interested in apocalypse than in agricultural improvements.

Ottercove is an extraordinary creation, and his strange end — a literal disappearance into thin air — encapsulates the book's slightly disturbing spirit. It moves from romantic fantasy to evocation of what could be called High Media Mogulry to a bizarre apocalyptic coda set on a Swiss hillside. This end — based on the concept of the end of the world happening piecemeal, in stages — came from D.H. Lawrence's suggestion that the world might end in the same way nylons run. Gerhardie also canvassed HG Wells for ideas on how to accomplish this bit-by-bit apocalypse, which stumped the father of science-fiction.

In the 1930s Gerhardie wrote a book with Prince Leopold of Loewenstein, "Meet Yourself as You Really Are," which has been described as an early example of hypertext. The catalogue of his works in the New Directions "Futility" describes "Meet Yourself ..." as "about three million detailed character studies through self-analysis"; Loewenstein would sit around talking about psychological types, while Gerhardie rendered the whole into witty, elegant English. He also wrote a book of memoirs and a history of the Romanovs, and continued to write fiction. Much of this is out of print and difficult to track down, aside from the recent reissues referred to above.

Aficionados of Waugh, the early Huxley and Anthony Powell will appreciate Gerhardie's mad world, at once tragic and comic. Erotic longing — with an accompanying awareness of the absurdity of erotic longing — dominates his work. There seem to be a steady succession of beautiful sets of sisters in all the books, with interchangeable names like Nina and Zina, and a steady succession of eccentric relatives. Reading two Gerhardie novels in one consecutive sitting can be somewhat disorienting. With his gift for creating memorable characters with a great economy of means and letting them loose on an oddly inconsequential world, Gerhardie deserves to be read once more by all who care about the novelist's art.

— Seamus Sweeney (seamus.sweeney@campus.ie)

— graphic by Andy Ross