Author, journalist, man of business, adventurer, and now spy: Nicolas Notovitch is on his way home.

‘I owe the next phase of my career to a louse.’

The return journey to Paris devours Nicolas’s cash. He’s uncharacteristically free-handed with his money, assuming that – worst-case scenario – his investment in the wine business will have held its value.

But the vintner’s has gone belly-up: the shop is derelict, the signage peeling, and half a dozen dusty bottles are the only remnants of the once-pristine display.

Two unforeseeable events have bankrupted it. First, the phylloxera louse, which has continued to munch steadily through French vineyards while he’s been away; then the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which plunged the entire world into several years of unusually cold weather. The output of French wine has crashed as a consequence.

‘Bummer,’ says Volchkov, tearing chunks off a baguette with a practised wristy action that reminds Nicolas of the way his older brother used to give him Chinese burns. Volchkov has changed almost beyond recognition. Nicolas expected to find the old reprobate drink-stained and roistering still, but he’s married, with a tiny daughter on whom he dotes. He’s cut his long hair off and is working as a teacher in an art school, still poor, still talking about his plans for photopeinture, but with less conviction.

Nicolas takes him out a couple of times, in the hope of enticing him on to some serious dissipation, but Volchkov heads home early on both occasions and speaks with an eerie but sincere enthusiasm about the pleasures of being a parent.

At least Mère Gigout, his old landlady, has hardly changed, or so little that it’s assimilated at once into the mental image Nicolas carries within him. She offers him his old garret. Cashing the last of his traveller’s cheques, he’s able to scrape together the money for six months’ rent, and begins to scribble his way back to solvency.

And what of Nicolas himself? What changes have these two-plus years wrought?

I notice a change in his writing about this time. An orotund manner creeps in. The rough edges that give his early books their energy are planed off, and his output begins to bloat into longer and longer volumes – writing that conceals more than it enlightens. Stories can be fog as well as knives, to veil the truths we’d much rather avoid.

Out of his own extraordinary facts, out of Naum, out of Kolya, out of the particles of MacGahan that he’s absorbed into his own being, he weaves the stuff of a sober bourgeois: a patriot, a Russian, a reactionary. He turns his eyes from inconvenient truths and picks facts to confirm his stories: about his good intentions, the basic decency of people, the flawed but necessary institutions of state power. And out of all these approximations to the truth, a false self is formed: an outward shape, whose interior conceals the doubt and bliss and honest confusion that comprises the living man.