Journalist Fauzia is appalled to learn that her friend Reem, a recent Cambridge graduate from Bahrain, has disappeared in Cairo a few days before she is due to present a paper on her PhD research. Fauzia’s fear is mixed with guilt, since she is responsible for having enabled Reem to make progress in her PhD by giving her a laptop of sensitive information which she lacked the courage to use herself. This provided evidence of the involvement of Fauzia’s ex-husband’s family, the Wilcox Smiths, in shady, very lucrative business deals with corrupt regimes in the Middle East.

The storyline then switches back to 1969, to trace the course by which Fauzia’s former father-in-law Martin made the transition from decent diplomat working for an Empire in decline to ruthless entrepreneur. Then, forty years on, we see the prosperous family through the eyes of Kate, a poor relative, as she makes ends meet by taking as a lodger Hussein, a doctor seeking asylum in the UK, having been tortured as a Shia in his native Bahrain.

The threads are gradually drawn together against the background of British “establishment” members who have lost political influence on the world stage, and seek to maintain status through the accumulation of wealth, regardless of the cost to others. It seems that a bad conscience can be quashed all too easily by conspicuous do-gooding and steering conversations through channels of vacuous politeness. Some bleak incidents are leavened for the reader with lengthy accounts of daily life in the Wilcox-Smiths idyllic country house, although at other times the incongruity of this makes the harsh realities appear more shocking.

This complacency explains the relevance of the title, which is taken from the famous line by Yeats: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”. It seems more apt for this book than the earlier one in the same verse, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, which the African writer Chinua Achebe has used already for his novel exploring the tensions created by colonisation.

Despite an original approach to an interesting and important theme, at times this novel risks falling between the two stools of political thriller and critical study of upper class manners. Initially, I was so impressed by “Ceremony of Innocence” that I thought the favourable comparisons with John Le Carrés work, made by some reviewers, did not go far enough. The variety of characters, with a convincing mixture of redeeming features and flaws (apart from the ruthless misnamed Dotty), seem particularly well-developed and realistic. Then I began to notice a few somewhat unlikely or unclear plot twists, the uneven structure of the novel, or the point where old habits die hard, and former journalist Madeleine Bunting has Hussein recount the circumstances which have brought him to England in the kind of objective, articulate flow better suited to an article based on interviews with asylum seekers. The novel’s climax is rather abrupt, although perhaps this is deliberate to build up the tension. The inconclusive ending, still dragging a few loose ends, is arguably appropriate to the morally ambiguous events. Ensuring that everyone gets the justice they deserve would have been too far removed from real life.

Some reservations apart, this novel proves very readable and thought-provoking, a good way of inspiring us to find out more, or to be reminded about the Middle East, and Britain’s involvement and degree of culpability in recent crises and personal tragedies there.