The volume of Kafka's works published during his life and posthumously is not large. It is minuscule compared with the continually rising tide of critical studies of the novels, stories and parables and the explorations of his life and milieu. In this short and incendiary book James Hawes takes a swipe at the specialist industry of Kafka scholarship. He is sufficiently qualified to do so: he has served his apprenticeship with the academic specialists and now turns on those who nurtured him. For readers like myself, who are largely ignorant of the scholarly industry, the best recommendation of Hawes' study is that it can enlarge our understanding and enjoyment of what Kafka wrote. His Kafka is a lively fellow, far removed from the accepted image of the miserable, ailing and haunted figure who casts his shadow over the novels, stories and parables. In Hawes' presentation Kafka is tall, dressed like a dandy, exercised regularly to maintain his physique (JP Muller's 'System'), kept a cabinet of fashionable pornography and enjoyed the sexual favours of prostitutes and young women on the make that he could command with his considerable salary and status as a rising corporate lawyer. He cultivated his considerable literary reputation with tactical skill and a degree of pardonable ruthlessness. It is true that he was tortured by the social necessity to contract marriage with a young woman of his own social milieu. In these relationships he was dishonest and manipulative and he responded by inflicting uncertainty and misery on his unlucky victims. The point of Hawes' deflationary narrative is that Kafka was, in many ways, a typical young man of his caste and class in pre-war Prague. What marks him out as different is his transcendent literary genius. Even here, however, the deflation of the life can add to one's appreciation of the works. It is wonderfully illuminating to learn that his friends laughed appreciatively when he read them the opening chapter of The Trial. Laughed? This is not what one expects of a first hearing of the arrest of Josef K for an unspecified crime. What has been obscured by the myth of the miserable, ailing and haunted Kafka and by the realities of two world wars and the Holocaust that was to follow, is that the opening chapters of 'The Trial', read to an appreciative audience by the author, was black social comedy, in Austria, in 1914.

'Excavating Kafka' has its faults. There is a relentless and grating tone of chumminess that accompanies Hawes' deflation: I wish he hadn't so consistently referred to Kafka as 'our hero' . Readers of a certain age will recall the recurring tag line in Pete Smith comedies. But there is much here to enjoy. The comparison between Kafka and Charles Dickens, who inspired him, is particularly illuminating. ( )