The Rebels, by Sandor Márai, trans. George Szirtes

When Roberto Calasso rediscovered the Hungarian writer Sandor Márai in 1998, most of Europe rightly greeted Embers as a masterpiece. Since then we have had two more Márais in English, Casanova in Bolzano and now The Rebels. Both are shot through with brilliance. But Márai can also be mannered, obscure, and above all disturbing. So is Kafka, whom he translated; but I'm beginning to wonder about Márai.

In a Hungarian school in 1918, the graduating class has shrunk from 50 to 17, the others having disappeared to the war. Soon these 17 will follow to the front, waved off by old men who tell the young how lucky they are to escape the endless training of their day. We meet four: Ábel the doctor's son and budding writer, through whose eyes we see most of the story; Tibor the colonel's son; Béla the grocer's son, and Erno the cobbler's son. They have nothing in common, but suddenly are inseparable. What binds them is resistance to the adult world. They mock it, they decline to partake in it, they turn all its rules upside down, daring each other to more and more pointless acts.

Ábel recalls this over a few days in May, when the gang can go to the local café without hiding from their masters. The moment of passage is brilliantly caught – the hatred of adults and the longing to be one; the realisation that this world may be less exciting than their dreams; the more sobering realisation, when they visit a prison, that their rebellion was unreal compared to others'.

Other details of adolescent psychology are pinned like butterflies to Márai's page: the fake boasting about girls; Ábel's agonising love for Tibor. But – as always in Márai – psychological accuracy is not the point. The point is, as in Embers: what happened, and what it means.

What happened is also much the same: a betrayal, or several. One of the gang has betrayed them to the adult world from the start; and the adults on whom they rely complete the betrayal. Appropriately, the novel ends before the consequences play out, but they will clearly be terrible. The consequence we witness remains within the gang's private world, and is the most terrible of all.

So the psychology is sharp and the plot gripping: what's the problem? Partly it's the fevered, airless atmosphere. The plot turns on set scenes, which grow more theatrical – until the last, literally set in a theatre. Add to this claustrophobia the morbidness of Márai's vision and the whole is hardly bearable. Everything is death and disease, murder and madness. The Rebels is a novel of adolescent despair, but somewhere there must be hope, or there's no point in carrying on, either with the book or with life.

You cannot separate a book entirely from its moral content. If it is too destructive of human value, or too inadequate to the whole range of human experience, it cannot be great art. And that is my final worry about The Rebels. The relationship between Ábel, indeed the whole gang, and Tibor is like that of Konrad and the General in Embers: Tibor represents an upper-middle-class civilisation they all admire. This, not a brief hatred of adults, is what really unites them. Márai said it was "perhaps my life's, my writing's sole duty" to delineate the death of that civilisation.

In Embers he found the perfect balance, seeing the General's limitations as well as his nobility, and portraying Konrad, the (possible) betrayer, with subtle sympathy. In The Rebels this balance has not yet been struck. The betrayal is not possible and mysterious but definite and despicable; committed by the oppressed out of envy and humiliation. The adolescents are not the only group whom the old men misuse: there are the poor, women, homosexuals, Jews. All, not just the adolescents, seek revenge. This is a great theme, but Dostoyevsky or Gogol wrote with sympathy for the have-nots, while Márai's sympathies are with the haves.

We have embraced him not just for his prose but for his courageous politics – both anti-Fascist and anti-communist – which sent him into exile. But at least when he wrote this, in 1930, Márai was a Nietzschean elitist who feared the poor, despised the rich, and admired only the aristocrat and artist. That, under its adolescent nihilism, is the message of The Rebels; and I don't like it.

Carole Angier's life of Primo Levi is published by Penguin

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