Boys and their boasts

The Rebelsby Sándor Márai, translated by George Szirtes  278pp, Picador, £12.99

Eighteen years after his suicide, in San Diego, California, the prolific Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai has knocked over his tombstone. Rediscovered in his native land in the 1990s, and then in Germany and France, he is available in English through two Kammerspiele or two-handers, Embers (2000; dramatised by Christopher Hampton under the same title, 2006) and Conversations in Bolzano (2004).

The Rebels, translated from Hungarian by the poet George Szirtes, is a livelier and more straightforward performance, published in 1930 just at the time that Joseph Roth was embarking on The Radetsky March. The question, both commercial and literary, is whether Szirtes can do for Márai what another poet-translator, Michael Hofmann, has done for Roth. There are said to be some 60 of Márai's books awaiting translation, but the appetite in the English and German-speaking lands for the remote literary provinces of the Austria-Hungary dual monarchy shows no sign of satisfaction.

Márai was born in 1900 in Kassa or Kaschau, a town in upper Hungary which was ceded at the Treaty of Trianon to Czechoslovakia. It is now the Slovakian city of Kosice, birthplace and nurse of Martina Hingis. Márai published his first novel in 1924, made his living from journalism in German newspapers, was at odds with the Nazis and then the communists and went into exile in 1948. He died, all but forgotten, in 1989 just as the collapse of Russian influence in Hungary heralded his literary revival.

The Rebels is set in a remote provincial resort over two days in May 1918, as the contraption of the dual monarchy is winding down. It tells the story of four boys in the interregnum between their graduation from high school and their dispatch to the slaughter mills of war. It is a sort of Fathers and Sons in which the fathers have mysteriously vanished, absent at the front or returned half-mad or in pieces, and their places have been taken by shady Bohemian types whose mere characterisation serves to unfold the story. Most sinister of these are a travelling actor with the stage name of Amade Volpay, who adopts the boys, and a fat pawnbroker worthy of Dostoyevsky, stuffing himself with rancid meat amid the carriage clocks and silver services of an empire falling ever deeper into hock.

Yet the boys - Abel, Tibor, Béla, Ernö - are still, as it were, across their father's knees. "There was no limit to the power of fathers," thinks Tibor, wrongly. In this disrupted and distracted town, where the women have taken to their beds, the boys begin to steal money from their houses and shops. With the money, they buy showy and unwieldy objects that they insist must have no use. (How could they have use for young men with just a month or two to live?) Saddles, globes, revolvers, elegant suits and gloves begin to overflow Tibor's house, and they move their repository to a down-at-heel inn half-an-hour by coach out of town and called The Peculiar. There they smoke and drink, boast about girls that in reality they have never kissed, and play cards. The book opens with Abel finding a second ace of hearts in his pack and, therefore, a cheat.

When Béla's father makes an audit of his grocery business, he sets in train events that will lead to catastrophe for the boys. The actor lures them into the darkened theatre where they act out a laboured erotic fantasy. Here, the story palls. It is not simply that the reader was promised, in place of this homosexual posturing, a visit to a nice Rothian garrison whorehouse. Rather, the additional layer of artifice taxes the reader's patience for the main fiction. Committed to this dull and overwrought scene, Márai cannot but end with far too much of everything.

Very few novels are not worse at the end than at the beginning, but it is the beginning that lingers in the memory, lit by strange lights and redolent of vanished smells, and all in Szirtes's strange but beautiful English. The war has reduced the boys' class from 50 to 17, but by processes that are not at all clear. The stationer no longer rushes out to pin flags on the maps in his window to show the victories of the Central Powers. When the trains roll in, there are no lady volunteers in "snow-white garments with red crosses on their armbands" but two bored orderlies and a bucket of lime.

Márai's Austro-Hungarian empire is not the satirical "Kakanien" of Robert Musil nor is it the vast and featureless engine of Joseph Roth. Where Roth's characters are nothing more nor less than their uniform and sash, Márai's are filled out with every kind of repellent habit. What comes across is a sort of premonition of modernity, where social class is disintegrating and a cobbler's son mixes with a colonel's. Objects themselves are on the move, all property mobilised by money, and all value reduced to sentiment and caprice, like Abel's aunt's secret "treasure" of invalid Lombard Street bills, Kossuth-era banknotes and worthless lottery tickets. At the core of reality for Sándor Márai is only a pawnbroker's receipt.

· James Buchan's Adam Smith and the Pursuit of Perfect Liberty is published by Profile