Philip Hensher’s career has taken him a long way from the clever, catty and somewhat show-offy books of his literary youth. Gone (or muted) are the salacity of Kitchen Venom, the gift for highbrow pastiche he displayed, to virtuosic effect, in The Mulberry Empire. What has taken their place is a low-key elegance of prose, an almost Dickensian generosity to all characters, even the most minor, but with just enough of the old acid left to avoid a lapse into slush. I confess to having found A Small Revolution in Germany the weakest of his recent novels. It holds the attention, though, and mounts an argument that makes one want – as novelistic arguments seldom do – to argue back. Spike, our narrator, starts the novel a schoolboy in the Eighties. Bright and articulate, he is more than ready for the two life-changing encounters he will have in the space of a few dozen pages. The first is with a gang of Lefty students, led by the drawling and confident Percy Ogden. Spike is welcomed to their ranks, eventually, though he has to tell a white lie or two along the way. But soon he becomes what he once falsely claimed to be: “the person in the Ogden group who had read Capital”. Even as he has a character dance around a menthol-smoke-filled room saying things like “I love, love, love Bakunin” while the group plans to disrupt a meeting of the CND with shouts of “Arm the global poor!”, Hensher tempers the satire with affection. The “Spartacists” are silly, of course, but Hensher doesn’t hold it against them that what they’re silly about is politics. Spike’s second transformative encounter is with the glamorous, wounded student Joaquin. When the stubbly Chilean radical leans in to kiss him, he is first shocked, then smitten, inducted into the erotic life and the political. Several lines of lyrical description later, he can say honestly (and a little comically) to himself: “I had never, it now seemed, been kissed… From now on I resolved to devote my life to the liberation of the urban proletariat.” A long second section has Spike, now a postgraduate student, accompany Ogden, now working for a Bennite Labour MP, on a trip to East Germany in (though neither knows it) its dying days. Hensher, an old hand at this territory, writes about the GDR with a wistfulness modified by his customary irony. Ogden reveals a dark side, a repressed and violent sexuality, and hints that his politics are on the turn: “You’re not going to hold the same beliefs that you had at 16 all your life. Not if you want to grow up at all.” The pair are split up and interrogated by the authorities; they never meet again. More time passes, off the page. It is now, more or less, the present. Ogden has transformed himself in the meantime into an unhappy cross of George Monbiot and Owen Jones. Another of the Spartacists has had a wardrobe and political makeover at (where else?) Oxford, and is now a Conservative Home Secretary. Spike is an unsung academic at an unnamed, presumably undistinguished, university. He and Joaquin are still together, both still in love and in possession of their youthful complexions. More surprisingly, they retain their old convictions, puzzled that they are the only ones of the old gang to have kept them. A little solemnly, Spike tells us: “My life has been devoted to a cause that has sometimes seemed impossibly remote and retreating from its realisation… And, as a result, we have lived lives of quiet satisfaction; lives of the utmost insignificance”. Their convictions manifest themselves principally in the odd attempt at arson directed at local estate agents. Spike’s account of himself leaves one with mixed feelings about him. There is an integrity in his refusal to dilute his principles. But there is also a hint of smugness, of fatalism and an inverted vainglory. Paradoxically, the fictional figure he reminds me of most is the “fine Old Tory of the ancient school” that Trollope described so marvellously in The Eustace Diamonds, a man pleased about having “been always in the right, and yet always on the losing side; always being ruined, always under persecution… and yet never [losing] anything”. What I missed most of all in this book was a sense that there might be alternatives to this unhappy choice between cynicism and wilful naïveté. Iris Murdoch, confronted by A N Wilson with the facts of her drift, or “lurch”, to conservative attitudes, is said to have replied: “I don’t like the images of lurching or drifting. I have thought about these matters.” A Small Revolution in Germany left me wondering if there could be an honourable way to grow up politically, a thoughtful way. Hensher’s previous fiction suggests that he has thought hard about these questions. He has been caustic about Left-wing cluelessness before – in The Northern Clemency, a character takes a swipe at the urban socialist whose contribution to the miners’ strike was to donate a can of chickpeas. But he has always had time for dissidents, the odd men out: the gay couple who run extremely well-catered orgies for the “bears” of Devon and Somerset (King of the Badgers), Bengali nationalists in the Seventies (The Friendly Ones and Scenes from Early Life), and the Bauhaus artists, who are depicted with such sharp sympathy in The Emperor Waltz. The tone this time is more ambivalent, a little darker, as if the novelist is looking for a way to love the radicalism without loving the radical. A Small Revolution in Germany by Philip Hensher is published by Fourth Estate at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop