Equilateral by Ken Kalfus, review That so much fiction has lately been set in Victorian times may owe something to a desire to correct the period's prejudices and blind spots, whether sexual (as in the novels of Sarah Waters) or racial, as in Eleanor Catton's Booker-winning The Luminaries, whose Maori and Chinese characters are as rounded as its Europeans. Writing about the past from a modern perspective can yield rich dramatic irony but also a sense of we-know-better smugness. That's a risk the American writer Ken Kalfus takes in his third novel, a clinical satire set in British-occupied Egypt in the twilight of Victoria's reign. Thayer, an English astronomer, is excavating an enormous equilateral triangle out of the desert (the sides are more than 300 miles long). He's going to pump it full of petrol, then burn it, to send a signal to Mars, home (he believes) to an advanced civilisation that can teach us how to cope with drought. Naturally there are snags: the local workforce, nearly a million strong, has downed tools; Thayer is sick from an unidentified bug; and to the dismay of his assistant Miss Keaton, he's doolally about an Arab servant girl. Kalfus writes over Thayer's head but from within his point of view. It's clear the astronomer is on another planet, making hollow boasts about universal progress as he green-lights a series of public hangings intended to focus the minds of mutinous labourers. Yet Equilateral doesn't play fair in highlighting his folly. Although there's comedy and pathos in spades, it often depends on Thayer's ignorance of Arabic, which appears in English, as if we - unlike the characters - have the luxury of inhabiting some sort of polyglot, post-cultural utopia. Thayer may save the day during a knife fight on a hot-air balloon, but his illness makes him a somewhat undramatic protagonist; events unfold largely in reports from his engineer. His language seems to draw more on the windbaggery of our day than his own: his backers learn Mars "may well be the force that makes us... courageous in facing our global challenges." It's fun to see such talk ridiculed - and to watch his project drift to its inevitable doom - but the sense that schadenfreude is the only game in town leaves a novel set under the blazing sun feeling rather chilly.