South of the River by Blake Morrison

Chatto, £17.99

KEN LOACH ONCE defined politics as the way that an individual tries to live her life in society.

With that in mind, it is not difficult to see Blake Morrison’s progress from two amazing memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, through his astonishing dissection of the nation’s soul in his account of the James Bulger trial, As If, to his second novel, South of the River, as a natural unfurling – as if the steady blossoming of an engaged political sensibility has been carried over to a different genre to bear fruit there.

South of the River is nothing if not a political novel – what Jonathan Coe, Martin Amis and Alan Hollinghurst have done for the Thatcherite Eighties, Morrison attempts to do for the insincere and superficial Blairite era, the late Nineties-early Noughties.

The novel starts with the “new dawn” of Labour’s election victory in May 1997 and ends almost exactly five years later – but Morrison eschews a larger public canvas for the story of five individuals and their interlaced lives, which, paradoxically, amplifies the politics, making “the personal is political” core much more resonant and powerful.

In one sense we are tracking the greed-saturated “me-me-me” generation of Thatcher’s reign, for all five characters are products of her time. Nowhere is the continuity between the Thatcher and Blair eras so stark, so undeniable.

Libby Raven, in her mid-thirties, struggles to be a good mother to her two daughters and a keen accounts handler for the advertising agency Arran & Arran, while being sup-portive, not least financially, of her feckless, whining, smug husband, Nat Raven, who has tried desultorily to make it as a playwright with no success at all. It’s hard to think of a more unsympathetic loser than Nat.

In time, he has a brief affair with Anthea Hurt, a confused, volatile liberal 15 years his junior, who wants to do something with her life – some political or social activism that will “give her life meaning”.

The liaison with Nat enables her underconfident self to translate idealism into action.

Harry Creed, a black journalist on the South London Gazette, has struggled against all sorts of things, not least his colour, to achieve a measure of stability in his life but this proves an illusion: a past indiscretion with a girl named Mar-cia has far-reaching consequences – while the disappearance of a black child from a council estate in Peckham, and a trial involving the child’s wrongly accused father, which he has to cover for the Gazette, draws him in deeper than he imagined.

Lastly, there is Jack Raven, Nat’s pugnacious yet insecure uncle, a 60-year-old master of foxhounds in East Anglia, and the owner of a steadily sinking lawnmower business, decrying the rise of new Labour and waiting belligerently for the ban on hunting.

With this cast, most of them denizens of South London, Morrison anatomises our times and achieves that rare thing: the creation of something substantial and important in fiction out of history as it unfolds in the here and now.

His filleting of the new Labour Zeitgeist is so ruthless and precise that one is torn between hilarity and despondency. I have never read a better skewering of the mendacity and dishonesty of this cast of ravens in power than in the antihunting speech by Rufus Huish, a new Labour MP, nor a more consummate demolition job of the pretentious, self-important emptiness of the advertising and publishing industries: the malign glee that Morrison takes in this just leaps off the page.

Morrison has mastered the art of cinematic jump-cutting in his fiction: as the stories coalesce and intertwine, the novel acquires a momentum that can easily have a reader looking over her shoulder with guilt – can a literary novel really be “'unputdownable”?

Through all this, Morrison weaves in a thread of poetic metaphor in the unlikely figure of the red fox that haunts urban spaces. At times it feels that he is engaged in nothing less than a modern mythopoeia of South London.

In a novel so rooted in the real, messy world of backstab-bing, betrayal and money-grub-bing, the surprising motifs of people as foxes, of foxes as enchanted creatures, of the incursions of the animal world into the human, invest the book with symbolic ramifications that make it transcend its psychological-realist anchoring. It is a wonderful touch, a jewelled pendant that catches the eye.

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