The critic faces the unhappy author

Graham Swift's latest book was a disappointment for Eileen Battersby, whose review led to a tense encounter with the author

It was unexpected, all of it. After all, British writer Graham Swift, author of Waterland, one of the truly great novels not to win the Booker Prize, and author of Last Orders, one of the few truly great novels that did win it, is among the finest of contemporary novelists. When The Light of Day was published in 2003, some seven years after his Booker triumph, it confirmed that Swift was simply getting better and better.

In that wonderfully tender novel, George, an ex-policeman turned private detective, falls for a woman who hires him to track down her errant husband, a gynaecologist. The woman is an academic and translator. George is the son of a High Street photographer, aware his own educational career was not overly impressive. There is an additional complication: George's client may or may not have killed her husband. So, as the narrative opens, she is serving time in prison.

Swift's new novel, Tomorrow, also has a central narrator. Paula, confidently approaching 50, is happily married to Mike and they have 16-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. It is a midsummer night and she is unable to sleep because the next day could change all of their lives. It could be a disaster, it may not be. But either way, nothing will be the same. A new novel from Graham Swift, his first in four years, is significant. The Irish Times agreed to interview him, even before the new novel had arrived in Ireland, never mind been read.

So Paula tells her story and that of her marriage and makes no secret of the nature of the revelation. She lies in bed beside her sleeping husband, aware that the next day will see her children discovering that the man who has reared them and loved them, and indeed once risked his life to save them, is not their father. Initially, there is the suggestion of either an affair or merely a desperate attempt to become pregnant.

It should be compelling and human, but Paula the narrator proved too cool and complacent for me, and never fully convinces, and I pointed this out in the review I wrote of the book. Nor did I much like her sexual candour in an imaginary conversation she is directing at her children. Graham Swift read the review and was given the option to decline the interview but decided to carry on with it. I don't know why he bothered - we didn't have an interview, because he was only interested in correcting the review. But perhaps the encounter has some value as a cautionary tale? Reviewers are useful - when they write favourably.

Over the years, since the publication of Waterland, I have reviewed each of Swift's novels, each one favourably. Having read his work, and twice interviewed him, I consider him one of the most consistently interesting fiction writers. Throughout his career, which began when his first two novels, The Sweet Shop Owner and Shuttlecock, as well as a collection of stories, Learning To Swim, earned his place in Granta's 1983 Best of the Young British Novelists list, he has been a major presence, always there - if overshadowed by the linguistic dazzle and satiric comedy of Martin Amis. Swift, Amis and Ian McEwan, as well as Salman Rushdie, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and William Boyd all featured in that class of 1983.

Swift has always asked questions without presuming to offer answers. Waterland, his third novel, remains a major achievement, and when people ask how it could have possibly failed to win the 1983 Booker Prize, there is a logical explanation - he had the bad luck to come up against probably the finest novel ever to win, JM Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K. In 1992, Swift published another impressive work, Ever After, one of the most underrated contemporary British novels.

Then flash forward to early 1996 and Last Orders, a colourful odyssey through the lives of a small group of Londoners who find themselves part of a pilgrimage when they are entrusted with the ashes of a mutual friend, Jack Dodds. On publication, it was destined for the Booker. It was also the book that showed how well Swift, the writer of ideas, could use voice. Yet just as voice proved the defining strength of Last Orders and The Light of Day, it does not succeed in Tomorrow, because Paula never lives off the page - or at least she didn't for me.

Graham Swift rises from his seat and makes it clear from the outset that he is not pleased. "I don't know how we are going to do this interview as that review you wrote may . . . was . . . well, may have been about another book. You said Paula was cold, she is not. She is warm and loving and really funny - but you missed that. I've never been in this position before."

I have. I can remember arriving for an interview with Nadine Gordimer. "Oh," she said, "I didn't realise it was you. I was very pleased with your review," she smiled at me, and then shrewdly announced to her publicist: "I've already had an excellent review from her - I don't need an interview in the same paper, I will go for a nap." Reviews, it seems, are about immediate market-place publicity, not literary criticism.

SWIFT IS AS DISAPPOINTED with my review as I was with the book. He falls silent, as he will several times over the duration of the long hour of an interview that felt more like a college tutorial - although I always remember them as being enjoyable.

"I can't understand how you failed to see my book as I meant it," Swift continues. At the beginning of his career, Swift was a teacher and it is the disappointed teacher, not the writer, who is present. Early on, I put to Swift that he can have the last word in the interview as it appears on the page - and that word or sentence will be his telling me "go read the book again". He seems to agree.

It is the first time I have ever had a major international novelist quote lines from my review back to me. "You said she is not 'sympathetic'; she is, she loves her husband and her children. She is happy in her life. You seem to have a problem with the fact that she is middle class. You like George, maybe you only like underdogs?" Is he commenting on my approach to fiction in general? Or merely to the book in question? I don't have a problem with middle-class characters and I don't only relate to underdogs, but I do know that I don't much warm to "cool and complacent", which is how Paula struck me, so perhaps Swift has a point.

Swift also points out that he can't "write the same book every time". I was not suggesting that he did. A middle-aged man and a young woman sitting across from us appear to be listening. It is embarrassing. I think I look like an undercover agent who let the quarry slip away and is now being ticked off by an outraged superior.

The tea is getting cold - the tea is cold.

"No bad review ever torpedoed a novel. An unfavourable notice may stop a theatre run, or discourage people going to a movie, but a book review doesn't have that power," I point out. "Your readers will read this book. Had my review been written by someone else, I would still read this novel as I have read all of your books." Trying to deflect the interview away from Tomorrow and back to his other books fails. "I don't want to talk about my other books, I am here to talk about my new one, the one you have thrashed. I just can't understand it, how you could fail to like Paula. I love her."

Obviously, he is pleased with this novel. "I am proud of and pleased with all my books, just as I am proud and pleased with this one, the book that you have misunderstood. I can't understand how an intelligent critic has got something so wrong."

NOT FOR AN INSTANT do I feel that I am St Sebastian-like, taking all the arrows that outraged novelists want to direct at wayward reviewers; instead, I am genuinely surprised that an experienced and established novelist is reacting in such a way. I also feel that the review is being as misrepresented by his reaction as he feels his novel has been. Not for the first time in this meeting (one can hardly call it an interview), I remind him that I admire his other books, but just don't happen to like this one.

"I don't know why you don't. This is a book about love, love, love. Paula loves her children; Paula loves her husband."

Muted exasperation fuels my reflex reply. "Than why does she have that affair with the vet?" There seems to have been more than a desperate attempt to become pregnant. He agrees ("That was an experiment"), but still he stresses the love and Paula's love. Paternity is one of the big themes of the book, although Swift cuts across, "there are lots of themes, especially love".

It seems unfair that Mike's role as a father could be diminished by a medical technicality; after all, he has raised them. In the strongest scene, a holiday swimming drama almost ends in tragedy, but for Mike's courage. "Oh yes," says Swift drily, "I'm glad you liked that bit." When he says "love is keeping her awake. She is worried about Mike," I suggest that her sleeplessness may also be due to her unease over being about to spend her 25th wedding anniversary night in the same hotel room in which she had had her fling with the vet.

But nothing exists except for the review, which was not a hasty slam job, just a disappointed response to a book I couldn't believe. Perhaps had the book been written 30 years ago, or 50 years, the method of conception may have been more shocking. I contend Mike is still the father; a test tube can't compete with a man with a face. Does Swift have children? "No, by choice," he says. As he rises and half-heartedly offers his hand, side on as he moves away, I remind him that he has the final word. So here I am concluding as agreed: the novelist says: "Read the book again."

Tomorrow by Graham Swift is published by Picador, €13.99