The opening scene is a society gathering: a fairly large cast of characters is introduced. But soon, the focus falls upon Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and on his young, pregnant wife, Lise; and on Pierre Bezukhov. Andrei is elegant and socially polished, though proud and somewhat aloof and reserved; he obviously does not enjoy being at the society gathering, even though his behaviour there is perfectly correct. He is going to war soon, to serve in the Austrian campaign against Napoleon. He has married Lise, beautiful, charming and vivacious. And there's Pierre, the only person whom Andrei is pleased to see: unlike Andrei, Pierre is clumsy, both physically and in terms of social etiquette. Andrei asks Pierre to accompany him back home.

And now, we have an extraordinary scene. Andrei, the envy of everyone for having made so brilliant a match, shocks Pierre by telling him openly how unhappy he is. Lise, despite her qualities, is not her husband's intellectual match; and Andrei feels he is being stifled: the marriage, he feels, is preventing him from achieving all the great things he feels he is capable of. This is perhaps the first time Andrei has spoken so openly to anyone: as we later see, he tries to hide his disillusion even from his father and sister.

At this point, Lise enters. She may not be intellectually brilliant, but she understands why Andrei is going to war: it is to get away from her. But she cannot understand why her husband feels this way. The drama is outstanding. Each of the three characters reacts to each of the others, and in the process, we learn more about each of them. Pierre, despite loving his old friend Andrei, is shocked by Andrei's coldness to Lise.

I have dwelt upon the opening chapters, as it sets the tone for the novel. The characters are not mere invented names - they are living beings, with a depth we rarely encounter in fiction.

For fiction, depth of characterization requires more than mere observation. In life, people - rather paradoxically - change, even as they remain the same. This change is determined by a number of things: it is determined by what they experience in the course of their lives; and also by their underlying character, which decides which of their experiences affect them, in what way and to what extent. And this ever-changing nature of the characters will determine their choices, which, in turn, will determine their experience. All this, of course, makes for great complexity: mere observation cannot hope to encompass this. And perhaps no author penetrated so deeply into these complexities as did Tolstoy. He gives the impression not that he had merely observed these characters from the outside, but that he knows them from the inside.

Soon, new characters are introduced. There are literally hundreds of characters, but the main focus falls on Pierre Bezukhov, and on two contrasting aristocratic families, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. The Rostovs are warm, generous and genial: the good-natured old Count seems unable to hold on to the family wealth, and secretly feels guilty; his wife tries to compensate, and as a result sometimes appears selfish. They have a son, Nikolai - no intellectual, but generous, open and honest. He has formed a childhood attachment to the Rostovs' adopted daughter, Sonia, who takes the childhood attachment too seriously for comfort. And there's Nikolai's sister, Natasha - a charming a vivacious young girl. The Bolkonskys on the other hand, are very different. Old Prince Bolkonsky is proudly intellectual: he has cut himself from society, which he considers empty-headed and frivolous. In his own estate, he enjoys virtually unlimited power; and, without realizing it, he has turned into a domestic tyrant. His daughter, Maria, is devoted to her father, and bears his tyranny as best she can. She has become attached to a very sentimental religiosity. Her father loathes this sort of thing, but insists - despite everything - that his children have absolute freedom to do as they wish.

And there's Pierre Bezukhov - well-meaning, kind-hearted, and far from stupid - but clumsy and bumbling. When we first see him, he is a dissipated young man, easily led by the sort of elements of society that the Bolkonskys despise. After unexpectedly inheriting his father's fortune - despite being illegitimate - he is tricked into a disastrous marriage. Through the novel, we see him developing, searching, never entirely satisfied with what he finds.

These are merely thumbnail sketches. These characters are all far more complex, and never ceasing to surprise us with their complexities. We see them develop over time. And two great shadows of decay fall over this development.

Early in the novel, Pierre is called to his dying father's bedside. His father, who was once as physically powerful as Pierre is now, has been turned over in bed, but does not have the strength to drag his arm after him. He sees Pierre gazing at this in terror, and smiles at him. Old Prince Bezukhov's physical decay casts its terrible shadow across the first part of the novel. Equally, the second part is overshadowed by the mental decay of old Prince Bolkonsky. Those chapters depicting his oncoming senility are almost too terrible to read.

Yet, the overall tone is not dark. Tolstoy depicts also the sheer joy of being alive. It is hard, for instance, not to respond to the sheer joie de vivre of Natasha. That Tolstoy could so convincingly enter the minds of Nikolai or Andrei is remarkable; that he could also enter into the mind of Natasha, and communicate her excitement and nervousness at her first ball, is nothing short of miraculous.

And, of course, there are the magnificent war scenes. Early in the novel, Andrei, Nikolai and others join the Russian forces to fight the French armies in Austria: that campaign ends in disaster as the allied Austrian and Russian troops are defeated by Napoleon at Austerlitz. In the second half of the novel, Napoleon invades Russia itself, and no-one can escape the devastations of war. The battle scenes are painted on a huge and magnificent canvas. Tolstoy himself claimed that these scenes are modeled on Stendhal's depiction of the Battle of Waterloo in "La Chartreuse de Parme", but it is fair to say, I think, that Tolstoy surpassed his model. To find battle scenes of such power, one has to go back to Homer's Iliad.

By the time of Napoleon's invasion, Andrei is utterly disillusioned and disgusted with everything. His life has fallen to pieces, and is left without purpose or meaning. On the eve of the Battle of Borodino, Pierre visits him in camp. It is merely a short scene, but is among the most heartbreaking in all literature. For the only time, Andrei is not pleased to see Pierre. He speaks bitterly about warfare in general. Given that Andrei comes from a military family, this is as close as he can get to expressing disgust for his own background - disgust, indeed, for his own self. Pierre recognizes something is very wrong, and leaves.

Quite apart from the principals, there are hundreds of characters whom we may call minor parts, or walk-on extras. Each one is characterized. Even the army doctor at the Battle of Borodino emerges from the operating theatre holding his cigar between his thumb and little finger so as not to stain it with blood. He only appears briefly, but a little detail such as this is enough to fix him in the reader's mind as a person in his own right, and not merely a name attached to a figure.

The technical bravura required to carry this off is stunning. Tolstoy can describe in one chapter the grand panorama of the Battle of Austerlitz; and in the very next, he shows Natasha having a heart-to-heart conversation with her mother before going to bed. And somehow, for reasons I still cannot quite fathom, there is no sense of anti-climax. Everything depicted, whether scenes of battle or of domesticity, is depicted with such conviction and truthfulness, that criticism seems pointless.

The second half of the novel is, perhaps, marred by Tolstoy's frequent interruptions of the narrative to offer his theories of history. Interesting though these passages are, they are out of place in the novel. But in the context of the achievement, pointing out flaws such as this seems an impertinence.

If one may be so bold as to try to summarize the essential point of so vast a work, I would say it is about change. Under the shadows of Prince Bezukhov's physical decay and of Prince Bolkonsky's senility, we see the various characters developing from childhood into youth, from youth into middle age, or into old age and death. They all change, and yet, somehow, remain the same characters. The conclusion is fascinating in this respect. In the main body of the novel, we follow these characters through some seven or eight years; in the conclusion, we jump forward another seven or eight years, and see the characters again - changed once more, and yet, somehow, recognizable. Pierre has not learnt great wisdom from his experiences, as he thought he had when we had last seen him: he is still searching, still dissatisfied. Natasha is now entering middle age, has put on weight and has lost her looks. Romantic readers haven't forgiven Tolstoy for this, but it rings true. Maria, no longer dominated by her father, seems more like a Bolkonsky every day. And so on. An ordinary novel brings everything to a halt by the end; but this is no ordinary novel. These characters have developed, and will continue to develop. And the last word is left to the newly emerging generation: we finish with the son of Andrei and Lise.

War and Peace is, as everyone knows, an extremely long novel. But each time I have reached the end, I have wished it longer. More than any other novel I know of, it seems to capture the very essence of life itself in all its majesty.

Himadri Chatterjee currently works as an operational research analyst for an airline, and lives near London, UK, with his wife and two children. What spare time he has apart from his day job and family commitments, he likes to spend reading, and listening to classical music. He also loves the theatre, good conversation, and good whisky (he is a long-standing member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society).
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