This review will involve reasonable reference to the Czech writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924). This is not for the simple vicarious intellectualism afforded by doing so, nor for the opportunism for wheedling in the irritating term Kafkaesque. It is because The Viaduct - published in 1982 and written by David Wheldon (b 1950) - necessitates it. From the protagonist's name, A, to the novel's rotund bureaucrats and their scurrying assistants, to the ostensibly diversionary, disjointed aside events and characters, and finally to the suspiciously familiar fate of the hero, David Wheldon invites comparison.

The Viaduct purports to be an existential allegory of life, the journey of and, by definition, the experience of. It tells the story of A, a man tried, convicted and served of sedition, and his journey / flight from subsequent retrial and sentence. It begins on a viaduct and the railway it bears, which runs straight and unerringly forward, and along which A makes the acquaintance of figures deemed to suit the metaphor: mainly the 'tall man', experienced in his journeying, of uncertain history, and replete with journey's wiles; his companion, the 'small man', an 'accomplished thief', whose role is presumably to provide a counterpoint to the others, especially the tall man's ragged railway sophistication. The terminus of the journey remains unknown till the last few pages. For destination, the only hint given is the enfolding horizon of distant hills, which throughout the travellers' pilgrimage to the unknown provide the visual limit, and looming witness to the travel and its events.

Events befall, characters unceremoniously surface and submerge, but - to be honest - the crux has already been given in the few words above: it is the onward going, seemingly teleological procession of A, and all it glibly claims to signify. To talk of supporting characters, their entrances, exits, A's bifurcations and distractions from the railway and its silent goal would only be to journal the contingent succession of details that are best provided by a reading of the book. The novel's greatest strength is achieved, unintentionally, through what it lacks: it invigorates an appreciation of Franz Kafka through falling short of its obvious intention to capture something of the Czech's aim.

It is not the place here in a review of someone else's book to layer interpretations onto Kafka. Besides, Kafka is all things to all people. It is simply that David Wheldon fails in his obvious and unimaginatively disguised intentions. The Viaduct remorselessly lifts from Kafka, but does so without the gestaltist cohesion of parts or the existential qualia. Right at the beginning, the book offers the raiding of A's lover's house by the authorities who are hoping for the discovery of more damning literature. The small man abruptly meets his fate, and the tall man threads thinly through the plot. None of these events or characters provides any necessary import or insight: they dangle limply from the stiff body of text like dead growth, barely attached and ready to drop by virtue of a diseased irrelevancy. The lack of ceremony that surrounds the episodes may indeed be part of the book's allegorical intention - after all, people known or met in the present or past do drop in and out of the 'journey' of anyone, die, deceive, irritate and support without the fanfare that literary narrative, ripe with significance and gifted with retrospection, often presents. But conversely, unless David Wheldon is being winkingly subtle - something not suggested by the blatancy of his allegory - this point is not stressed to the extent of being a significant objective. In Franz Kafka's books, the minutiae of distraction become the complete absorption of his main players. In pursuit of the greater objective, Franz Kafka's heroes become inextricably obsessed in the side-details, the contingent, the bit-parts whose actions and foibles become consuming fascinations for the protagonist. An unheralded event behind a closed door, a chance encounter with a woman, a well-intentioned or thoughtless action, all of which result in messy entanglements for which the hero must bear anguished responsibility - these are the marks of the existential, the lived.

David Wheldon's hero is at all points the rationalist: each word, action or foible of the others is ruminated, digested and examined before each footstep gets the opportunity to bootprint the hard unflinching truth of the railway. Franz Kafka is the lived, David Wheldon is the reflected. This is initially given by the prose: terse and predicting, perpetually analysing the events and characters, full of uncertain probabilistic terminology, but is subsequently carried through with little stylistic change into the dialogue. Indeed, it's a good job he uses inverted commas, otherwise the book would read like an autistic's ramblings. The description of scenes, people and occurrences continues with flat uniform style through the thoughts and words of the characters, mimicking the heavy stumble of the narrative's turgid sputter. One begins to become uncomfortably aware of the words on the page. David Wheldon drops unnecessarily large or rarely-used words into the text, which sit cumbersomely, and rupture through the fabric of the novel. They rest uneasily on the reader's palate and weigh upon the story's already strained stitching. Notably, the small man, of humble deprived background - although conveniently explained away by a love of big words and lofty phrasing - speaks with all the staccato clinicality of the narrative - only more so: he pastiches it. His situation is lucidly self-transparent. Like the others, he is, at the point he is first encountered, the ethereal emanation of a solid enclosed history, an epiphenomenal, reflective bubble of a life that is not shared with the reader. At the point of presentation, the characters are ready-formed and remain only the weightless vocalisations of hermetically-closed lives; they are on a journey, no doubt, but there is no sense of development. They are the pure introspection of already complete characters.

The Viaduct may claim to be a metaphor for life, but the railway along which the journeyers travel is likewise a metaphor for The Viaduct. Strict steel lines, born of measurement and built for a definite and known destination, that cut unbendingly through the landscape, piercing through hills, carried over valley, as the scenery rises and secedes around it - it is never swayed in its path. It offers nothing of the existential that Franz Kafka does: David Wheldon's distractions and deviations are purely distractions and deviations from the real, never the real itself, the consuming events that reciprocate around each other.

The book's denouement - and to David Wheldon's credit, the anticipation of which provides the impelling force to read - is unpredictable insofar as someone wouldn't be expected to do something so predictable to paper. Having got there, one may feel stupid for not seeing it coming - prepare to feel an unimpressed dissatisfaction when it does. Similarly, those who have read Franz Kafka's The Trial (published posthumously in 1925) will be in for no surprises as to A's fate.

When reading The Viaduct, Franz Kafka's work flits back and forth through the mind, surging foremost as and when David Wheldon most invites it. As such, The Viaduct is a difficult work to judge on its own merits. It lacks comparatively in its intention to capture the engagement of the individual in the world and the anxiety of the choices that that entails. Franz Kafka digresses and whirls. There is no more meaning to waiting in a queue than there is to the nameless crime that Josef K (his protagonist in The Trial, which begins: 'Someone must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested') is tried for: it is an interminable frustration that greets every action with the same cold indifference and lack of justification. David Wheldon's railway gives the allegory a purpose, a course and a destination: A may briefly leave but must soon return to the rational lines that point his direction. It is very much an Englishman's Kafka: the dizziness of the irrational primary, the lived, is pinned down, dissected, labelled and put on display, and is always given primarily and only as such, without describing the prior existential experience.

But Franz Kafka's curse is also The Viaduct's blessing. It gains levity through association. What would presumably be only an uninspirational but readable fable gains body and sustenance through a vicarious exploration of Franz Kafka's concerns. And the simplification of the Kafka-like theme makes for a much more digestible read. By shearing down the ravelled outgrowths, the desire to uncover the mystery of the railway (much as a reader may hope to discover, say, Joseph K's crime), the read becomes less complicated and more focussed, and compels the reader onwards without the exhaustion that sometimes goes with Franz Kafka.

It's hard to know whether to recommend The Viaduct to readers who haven't read Franz Kafka's books. Those who like them might come to The Viaduct as a curiosity, enjoyable insofar as, through its simplicity, it rouses a pleasant reminiscence of something a lot more complicated and engaging. It refracts a distilled, enjoyably unchallenging image of more complex works, and the feeling of an intuitive grasp of them. In the face of David Wheldon's unjustifiable, apparent teleology, they can take a fond pleasure in the superiority of the notion of Franz Kafka's otherwise troubling refusal to give the world a guiding justification. Incidentally, David Wheldon claims to have written The Viaduct before having read The Trial.

(c) Sam Penwill 2007

Reviewed 28 November 07 / London

NOTES - The Viaduct, first published 1982, written by David Wheldon, is available from eg Amazon. Extracts can be read online at www.davidwheldon.co.uk. The Viaduct won The Triple First Award in 1982 - final judges were Graham Greene and William Trevor. Graham Greene: 'The Viaduct is really a remarkable novel'. William Trevor: 'It is a fascinating and original work of art. I still remember the book long after reading it; this is the real test of fiction.' Janice Elliott, The Sunday Telegraph: 'The Viaduct is a mysterious gripping allegory - spare, accomplished and mature - a remarkable achievement.' Miranda Seymour, The Spectator: 'It will be very interesting indeed to see what this exceptional and accomplished writer does next.'