This conclusion to Ali's Islam Quintet opens promisingly: as a lament for lost intellectual freedoms in Lahore before the mullahs  a chaotic city of craftsmen, walled gardens and juice bars abuzz with poets and painters arguing over tea and samosas. Unfortunately, when our soixante-huitard activists catch up with one another in middle age and compare notes on their trajectories, what remains is mostly noise. London, Paris, Karachi and Beijing are merely nominal backdrops to polemical digressions and clunky seductions. But at least our narrator belongs to a soi-disant "valiant minority of dissident publishers, intellectuals and workers who regularly and courageously challenge the established order and its mediacracy  men and women who live in a huge bubble, who are unable to account for themselves, and do not regard this in any way as a problem, who rarely question the socio-historical realities that have produced them" . . . and so on. Does anybody actually talk like this, apart from Ali and his friends?