Come like shadows by Simon Raven

Out of print and picked up in a secondhand bookshop - yes there are still a few.

Twenty years ago I discovered Simon Raven and read every one of his books that I could get my hands on.    Unfortunately this was a difficult prospect even then as, like many quality writers, one edition was all that his publisher would risk.   It is still possible to come across a volume in one of the increasingly rare secondhand shops, charity shops are only interested in recently printed mass market stuff.  
"Come like shadows" is one of a series of novels that Raven entitled "Alms for Oblivion" and wove stories around a range of exotic characters.
This novel concerns Fielding Grey, a novelist ex soldier, who is hired by an American film company to work on a script based on The Odyssey.   He travels to Corfu where the film is to be shot and all is well until a team of academics from the University, one of whose trust funds is putting up the money for the film, arrive to check on progress.   They reveal that the University had been taken over by the students, this being the early seventies, who were incensed that Homer only wrote about Kings and warriors and were demanding that working class characters be introduced.   The students insist that one of the actresses, a Vanessa Redgrave type, be given supervision of the script and the producer gives Grey the job of ensuring that her intervention causes least possible harm.  
This, like all Raven novels, is excellent.   His subtle prose brings acceptability to highly coloured characters and situations and wafts the reader along like a Rolls Royce limo and produces the same feeling of being somehow introduced to a higher plane.