ONE OF US: A Novel.<i> By David Freeman</i> .<i> Carroll & Graf</i> .<i> $23, 278 pages</i>

The apparent love affair between Edwina Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy of India, and Jawaharlal Nehru, who became its first prime minister in 1947, neatly epitomizes the relationship between colonial master and colonized servant.

Such a liaison between conquerors and subjects happened often in the days of the British Empire’s glory. David Freeman, a Los Angeles screenwriter, novelist, essayist and book reviewer (for this newspaper, among others), draws on such historical circumstances for “One of Us,” an engaging novel of British masters and Egyptian servants in the darkening days of the 1930s as a world war loomed.

The British in this well-crafted tale are Sir Malcolm Cheyne, the High Commissioner, who rules Egypt; Vera, the well-bred English lady who becomes his wife; and James Peel, a young man who serves as principal narrator. The chief Egyptian character is the young prince who will become King Farouk.

“One of us” is what the British want Farouk to become. To that end, they recruit Peel from his teaching job at Winchester, a fancy secondary school, and send him to Egypt to instruct the prince.

Freeman marvelously conveys both the shock and the overwhelming attraction the young Englishman feels when he plunges from the staid confines of his homeland into the all-permissive atmosphere of Alexandria. Peel tries opium, then falls into the arms of degraded and complaisant girls.

“Their degradation enflamed me,” he explains, “and told me of desires that could not be denied even if they could not always be named. . . . There was a fierce satisfaction of the flesh, if not the spirit.”

All the while, Peel corresponds with a young Englishwoman he might have married but, under the circumstances, their relationship wanes rather quickly.

He tutors Farouk with a zeal that does him and the empire credit. But Farouk shrugs off his instruction with a short attention span and a surfeit of silly riddles. At one point, Peel instructs his charge in the wisdom of Thucydides and his account of the Peloponnesian War.

“Your place in history, the King’s place, and in fact the place of the Dynasty will be established by historians. You would do well to know their ways,” he tells the teenager.

Peel hands the prince a copy of the book. The prince thumbs its pages: “Very impressive. I am grateful to you for pointing it out to me. Now, Mr. Peel, please tell me what is black and white and yet red all over.”

In the end, Farouk proves to be a disappointment. The British send him to a second-class military school in England, but he never becomes, as they had hoped, “one of us.” Farouk also reveals alarmingly favorable sentiments for the Nazis, so Cheyne forces him to abdicate.

Once handsome and virile, Farouk voraciously pursues women while he grows grotesquely obese. He is partial to English women and Vera, the wife of now-Ambassador Cheyne, finds his gestures and appearance not unattractive. She becomes, for a while, the fictional counterpart of Edwina Mountbatten.

In the end, of course, Britain lost Egypt. Freeman skillfully employs overtly sexual scenes to consider Britain’s relation to its colonies, such as when Peel visits one of his mistresses in Cairo:

“She would remain beneath, open to me, making it plain that my pleasure was what mattered, and yet she was in control of all that occurred. She managed our rhythm, and yet I felt dominant. Later, when I thought about our coupling, it reminded me of England in Egypt. We thought we were in charge but the Egyptians knew so much better that we were only here on temporary sufferance.”

As Peel learns, control of a country, or of oneself, slips through one’s hands like grains of sand.

“One of Us” is a fascinating book that persuasively suggests Britain’s grasp on Egypt was illusory all along.