Prague Arthur Phillips Duckworth, 400pp, £10.99 ISBN 0375759778

If you can remember it, you weren't there. So goes the cliché about the Sixties - though the real paradox is that those who utter it generally go on to reminisce at tedious length about the supposedly forgotten years. Arthur Phillips's novel draws on his experiences of a more recent blissful dawn - central Europe in the early 1990s - and it comes with a similarly unpromising conceit. Despite its title, Prague is set in Budapest, and Bohemia's city of a thousand spires serves only as a counterpoint to life in the Hungarian capital between 1990 and May 1991.

Phillips's twentysomething American protagonists have arrived in the slip-stream of the region's revolutions, but news from Prague suggests that they may already be in history's backwaters. "Fifteen years from now people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s," frets one of them at the novel's outset. "That's where real life is going on right now, not here."

So huge a contrivance could have generated some pretty heavy-handed messages, but Phillips deftly stows his device almost as soon as he unveils it. Further references to Prague barely figure, and the city simply lurks: an ethereal reminder that experience stems as much from imagination as from presence, and that memory is the most fickle thing. The various scams, spies and lies that entwine the novel's characters certainly invite readers to contemplate the complexities of desire, subterfuge and satisfaction. Yet the characters are an engaging and witty bunch who will keep you entertained whether or not you take up the challenge. Even when Phillips succumbs to didacticism, he stays just this side of arch. One of his expats, a nominally gay Canadian who is said to be researching the "history of nostalgia", offers up solemn theories about evanescence - but he is still convincing, in a yawn-of-recognition kind of way. And like Prague, the ideas linger, illuminating the unrequited loves, mayfly moments and post-coital tristesses of a protean city that is vanishing even as it is described.

The novel is not without flaws. Its purpler passages emit the distinct whiff of an overripe travel diary, and Phillips lets down the zeitgeist with some odd anachronisms (his characters' occasional references to the Prague Post are either uncanny or misplaced, given that the newspaper was not launched until five months after their adventures end). But ultimately Phillips not only conjures the poignancy of a disappeared Budapest but, in suitably oblique fashion, also memorialises the Prague that he so fleetingly touches.

I lived in the Czech capital between 1990 and 1993, and though it was in fact eerily calm during the period described by Phillips, all hell broke loose after October 1991, when it was pronounced the Left Bank of the Nineties by the aforementioned Prague Post. Thousands of American graduates flocked in, all anxious to rub shoulders (at the very least) with the Hemingways and Nins of their generation; superstition was rife that among them strode the writer who would one day chronicle the age. If that hero ever frequented their pen-chewing poetry workshops, he or she is keeping very quiet about it - but for my money, Phillips has come about as close to nailing the Nine-ties Left Bank as tangential can get. The themes that concern him, authenticity and the elsewhereness of life, mirror those that once drove Czech émigré authors such as Josef Skvorecký and Milan Kundera. His characters, like many a glum sensualist of pre-1989 Czech literature, may seize the day, but they never forget that the present is sandwiched between past and future. Even Phillips's personal absence from Prague seems a suitable qualification for fictionalising it. Because, let me tell you, anyone who'd claim to remember it just wasn't there.

Sadakat Kadri's Cadogan Guide to Prague is in its fifth edition. His most recent book is The Trial: a history from Socrates to O J Simpson (HarperCollins)

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