The Flower Beneath the Foot by Ronald Firbank (1923)

The feeling with this novel is that it is the apotheosis. The absolutely typifying central point may have been reached. Another striking thing about it is the realisation of how much of it is Firbank's own work. I am used to thinking of him as the assembler of shards, a builder of puzzles made of many little pieces. But in fact most of the grand swing of this is in his own words, or so it seems. Set in the mythical Mediterraneo-Arabic tiny nation of Pisuerga, in its camply overdone royal court, this is the story of Laura de Nazianzi's doomed private passion for Prince Yousef, and about the visit of the king and queen of a neighbouring nation, The Land of Dates. Full of hints of decadence, overstated heatedness and tendencies toward hissing confession and the pull of the cloister, Firbank serves up a feast of orientalist, colonialist, aestheticist hues. It never happened, but one can imagine the illustrated edition, with full colour plates and exquisite gold tooling on the cover. His liking for an oddly turned sentence is in full spate in this - with a particular penchant for what might be called interpolative qualifying - little tippings-in between commas in a larger clause(!), which lend an unmistakable rhythm: "Propped high by many bolsters, in a vast blue canopied bed, the Archduchess lay staring laconically at a diminutive model of a flight of steps, leading to what appeared to be intended, perhaps, as a Hall of Attent, off which opened quite a lot of little doors, most of which bore the word: "Engaged."" Many are simpler, with short one-word furtherings like that 'perhaps' which fulfil the Firbankian cloudy swish-of-the-hand intent perfectly. The fact that these assemblages are reasonably clearly all his own is the most important one. He was not only a magpie of the oddness of Edwardian high conversation, he was also a phenomenal stylist in his own right.