T HE great pleasure of a literary hoax is external to the book itself. Those are hard to detect, because Jones makes an exemplary job of his crib, if it is a crib.
Fiction is fantasy, anyway.
Immediately he put everyone's backs up by reporting to the Spectator that the concentration camps could not be that bad if Mrs Steyn and Mrs Kruger had voluntarily taken shelter in them. He was then made to administer them and a long silence ensued. He was to become responsible for resettling no less than a quarter of a million victims. Both took to the trenches without demur. Jones is absolutely right to retrieve these wonderful genealogies from Buchan's copybook, and redeploy them, as if they were real.