When Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotter’s Club won the Bollinger prize for comic fiction in 2001, he was photographed holding a live pig. Such are the demands of being hilarious. The Rain Before It Falls (his new novel after seven undeniably funny predecessors) hopes for a different kind of publicity. Its author might be depicted holding a picturesquely distressed family album, perhaps, or a tattered edition of Rosamund Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove, one of the book’s inspirations, and cultivating a faraway expression. Coe has moved on: he’s after dignity, not pigs.

The Rain Before It Falls is a story without jokes told in pictures. It considers the lives of four generations of English women, from the late 1930s to the present day, through the painstaking scrutiny of 20 family photographs. The pictures are described by an elderly woman, Rosamund, who has just died: her miraculous reanimation is thanks to the touchingly old-fashioned mechanism of four cassette tapes found in her bungalow after her death. They are intended for Imogen, a lost relative last glimpsed (at a crowded party) as a blind girl of seven, before adoption took her out of Rosamund’s life for ever. After the funeral, Rosamund’s niece and two great-nieces gather in a London flat to listen to Imogen’s story.

It is a good story, packed (as family stories usually are) with secrets and lies, and patterns that recur through the generations in a satisfyingly frustrating fashion. Coe’s treatment of his characters has its habitual winning tenderness, and his perceptions are as acute as ever. The novel has, in other words, everything you need for success, which makes the narrative strategy all the more puzzling. For Coe has effectively doubled his distance from his subject by relaying the information through not just one but two essentially static forms – recorded voice and recorded image. It is mechanical reproduction gone mad.

Even Rosamund, Coe’s narrator, has doubts about the project. “These things have resonance for me – an enormous, almost supernatural resonance – but it’s terribly hard to convey that, in words. To you they will probably seem banal,” she frets. Images are, of course, special, and family photographs even more special: but how to get this across? What philistine hasn’t felt his or her heart sink at the prospect of a session with someone else’s holiday snaps? Everything posed and fixed, no dialogue, action suspended, not even the lowbrow rewards of the home movie, another chance to see Uncle Bob falling out of his hammock. As Rosamund says, “A photograph is a poor thing, really. It can only capture one moment.” Her task is to join these moments together, which she does in a voice whose characterisation is just a little too easy, and not quite consistent. “This is all so very difficult,” she says; other favourite phrases include “terribly hard”, “rather shocking”, “goodness knows” and “ghastly”. Yet the same conventional voice can describe someone staring with “bulbous, mesmerised fixity”, or have a highly literary experience of crying: “Hot salt tears sprang up in my eyes.”

This tonal unsteadiness wouldn’t matter so much if we heard anyone else speak, but Rosamund’s voice is pretty much all we have. Which means, as she might put it herself, that its authenticity and veracity matter terribly. Coe has escaped the constraints of comedy only to impose an unforgivingly restrictive structure on himself. He would make a wonderful straight man if he could just, paradoxically, allow himself to let go.

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS by Jonathan Coe
Viking £17.99 pp277
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (inc p&p)

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