He neglects his highly-strung wife, who weeps that she hates the country and yearns only to go back to England. Crabbe is unhappy he is now unable to drive, or bathe. The novel's implication is that he has fled to the far side of the world, away from ice and cold into the sweltering tropics, with his new wife to escape the guilt of this backstory (‘at the inquest he had been exonerated from all blame, and the coroner had condoned with him all too eloquently and publicly’ ). He survived but his passenger, his first, wife, did not. He is given one Major Inflection, characterisation-wise: back in England he crashed the car he was driving into a frozen river. But taking this novel on its own, as we are entitled to do, and knowing a fair bit about Burgess’s own life, it was hard for Crabbe to come over as anything more than a cipher. Crabbe features in the two successor books as well, so we might say that his characterization achieves a greater density and believeability as the trilogy goes on. Not that Crabbe is given much more roundedness. Fenella Crabbe is the only female character, (a few shrewish Muslim wives aside, covered very glancingly: plus Crabbe’s mistress Rahimah, a ‘dance-hostess’ at a local kedai, or bar, present only on the margins of this story), which tends to throw into relief the thin way in which AB characterizes women.

Lynne Burgess is there as Crabbe’s wife Fenella, blonde and a bit blowsy, fond of a drink and frequently dissolving into tears. Burgess puts himself into Time for a Tiger as the, by AB-fictional-standards, rather vanilla character Victor Crabbe. The book is based on Burgess’s own experiences as a teacher at an elite school in Kuala Kangsar, located in the western portion of modern Malaysia (what was then the ‘Federated Malay States’). The thing is: it's good in unexpected ways. It seems a little feeble noting that it is a very good novel, since this was the book that launched the career of one of 20th-century Britain’s best novelists.

Anthony burgess time for a tiger