As his candid autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly (1993) attests, despite the broader ignorance of the world around him, King himself was quite at ease with his sexuality (more so than many of his youthful partners), and homosexual characters often appeared in his novels, even during the pre-Wolfenden era when this was not without its dangers. (The British Council considered The Firewalkers (1956) - a roman-à-clef based on King’s experiences in Salonika - so potentially scandalous, for example, that they insisted that he either publish it under a pseudonym or resign from his job. He opted for the former, and the book appeared as the work of one Frank Cauldwell - the name of one of the characters in The Dark Tower, a young novelist who falls under the spell of an older, celebrated writer, war hero and adventurer.) This is not to say, however, that King was always happy. ‘In my early books, written at a period of loneliness in my own life, isolation is a recurrent theme,’ he confessed in the early 1970s, looking back to the beginning of his career.   

Perhaps most noteworthy of all though is the fact that age did little to diminish King’s talent. He might well have been something of an ‘old-fashioned man of letters who relies on his pen and whose position grows ever more precarious with each new lurch in book-trade economics’, as the critic, novelist and biographer D.J. Taylor once admiringly put it - but the same certainly couldn’t be said of King’s writing. His ‘openness to experience and interest in other people kept him writing into old age as freshly and perceptively as in his youth’, noted The Scotsman, praise that would no doubt have pleased the man himself. ‘I feel that I’m writing probably my best work,’ he told The Times when The Nick of Time made the Booker longlist, ‘but I do not feel it’s getting the recognition it should have’. He wasn’t wrong - although the novel had been published in April, most broadsheet reviews didn’t run until the Booker longlist thrust the book into the limelight that autumn. As Taylor observed, King was one of the very few writers still ‘capable of surprising their audience’ in their twilight years, and nowhere is this more in evidence than in The Nick of Time: an eye-opening, contemporary state of the nation novel that paints a vivid portrait of London in the very first years of the 21st century. 

At the centre of the story is Mehmet, an illegal Albanian immigrant, whose itinerant adventures in the English capital are the thread that links the lives of a small group of otherwise disparate city-dwellers together. He first appears as a knight in shining armour, coming to the rescue of Meg - an older widow, afflicted by MS - when her electric wheelchair awkwardly decides to give up the ghost on a pedestrian crossing. ‘It was as though God had sent him to me,’ she later tells her sister, Sylvia. ‘More like the Devil,’ thinks Sylvia. Angelic or infernal? Mehmet is a little of both. His charisma sees him charm his way into other people’s lives with apparent ease. First there’s Meg, whose lodger in the spare room of her Dalston council flat he swiftly becomes, paying his way by helping her around her home and offering her some much-needed company.  

Then there’s delicate and damaged Marilyn, a newly-widowed GP who lives (with her sister-in-law) and works in Kensington, and whom Mehmet first turns to for medical assistance when he’s injured in a fight, thereafter becoming her lover. And finally, Adrian, a wealthy, self-assured middle-aged businessman who buys his way into the Albanian’s affections with expensive dinners and weekend jaunts to his friends’ country retreats and whom Mehmet believes can secure favours from his friends at the Home Office, not to mention provide financial and legal assistance with the immigration authorities when they eventually come knocking.  

Twenty years on, reading the novel in light of both Brexit and Britain’s increasingly draconian asylum laws, this aspect of the story has only become more relevant. But even at the time, King wasn’t pulling any punches. One might not go as far as to call The Nick of Time an overtly political book, but it subtly demonstrates how broader social and economic policies that dehumanise and demonise various vulnerable groups trickle down through society, leaching their poison into one-on-one relationships between individuals.

This is neatly signposted from the novel’s opening page when King momentarily accesses the mind of a driver who’s been forced to standstill because of Meg’s wheelchair’s mishap. The man waits, ‘turning his head from side to side, an expression of exasperation on his face, as he had deliberately avoided looking at this wretched lump of a woman who did not seem to know how to get her wheelchair to work. Oh, for Christ’s sake! Couldn’t that biddy who had begun to cross the road herself give the poor creature a hand? These days there was no solidarity between people, it was a case of everyone for himself.’  

Mine is an attitude of profound, if resigned, pessimism about the world. I do not expect people to behave consistently well, and my observation is that few of them do