Fiction:It is inevitable that as Tony Blair makes his escape at some point over the next few months, we will have to endure quite a lot of looking back at the last decade - that putatively coherent block of contemporary British history to be known, probably, as The Blair Years.
Blake Morrison's new novel opens on the day after Blair's 1997 election victory, clearly staking out this ground. It ends in 2002, at a party to mark five years of New Labour. But this is not a political novel in any real sense. Which of course is fine - but it does rather leave you wondering why it sets its frame of reference so specifically.
Its five central characters have occasional observations to make about political personalities. They sometimes bemoan the troubles besetting the area in which they are themselves involved (third-level education or the manufacturing industry). For the most part, though, this is a tale of self-involved people who seem blind to any bigger picture. As such, I suppose, it might constitute a portrait of The Blair Years. But at 520 pages it's quite an elaborate way of saying very little.
Remarkably, this book would have us believe that the only contentious political decision taken by the Labour government between 1997 and 2002 was the move to ban fox-hunting. Certainly, it's the only public issue with which any of Morrison's characters engage to any degree.
For a book which its publisher is pushing as "the big British novel for our times" this rather raises the question as to what Britain it is they're talking about.
THIS BRITAIN, IT turns out, is represented by characters who form a dull inter-connected sleeper cell of middle-class exasperations. Libby, who is an advertising executive on the rise; her husband Nat, a failed playwright who teaches creative writing; their friend Harry, a journalist on a small local London paper; Nat's uncle Jack, overseeing the decline of the family lawnmower business in the countryside of East Anglia; and Anthea, a young woman who works for a south London council when we meet her first, and who we eventually learn has been one of Nat's students in the past.
In juggling the predictable comings and goings of this lot, Morrison imposes upon himself a peculiarly random structure which strangles any chance that the characters might have of making themselves believable. The book is broken into five parts, and each part takes place on a specific day. So we jump forward, as much as 18 months, from part to part, and spend a good deal of time being told what's happened over the period that Morrison has skipped. As a result, a lot of the major developments in the lives of the characters (a stroke, a death, the end of a marriage, the collapse of a trial, and more) all happen, as it were, off-stage. Which is infuriating, given that what happens on-stage is bland in comparison.
Morrison spends so much time telling us what we've missed, and what the characters think about it all, and what they thought about it while it was happening, that they have no chance to breathe, to come alive, and they remain flat on the page, lifeless and artificial - cyphers through which Morrison conducts some novelistic book-keeping.
Though the book is set mostly in and around London, there is no sense of the city. There is no energy, and little is seen of the world beyond the varying domestic arrangements of the protagonists. There is a terrible sense at times of Morrison feeling that he must cover certain ground with certain of his creations, and then doing so clumsily, by rote. Harry, for example, the main black character, is given a walk-on role in a couple of the city's most infamous racial set pieces - the New Cross fire of 1981 in which 13 black teenagers died, and which may or may not have been a racist arson attack; and the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence murder, which we see through Harry's eyes.
It's a terrible litany of box-ticking, which left me feeling embarrassed for Morrison.
There are elements of this book that seem to have been written according to a set of rules, as if the Blairite mania for targets and focus groups has informed Morrison's method. So characters are given space, but little depth, and they never seem much more than types, reductions and simplifications. They are put through collections of standard-issue scenes, with no surprises and no cumulative power. They are spread very thinly indeed across their five years.
AND AS IF to underline a point which he hasn't actually made, or to give the appearance of evocation without ever evoking very much at all, Morrison gives us a motif - a fox motif no less. There are foxes everywhere. Urban foxes, hunted foxes, mythical foxes in Anthea's sub-Jeanette Winterson writing, foxes attacking children, and - in the book's best moment - the fox as recent ancestor in a bit of soft porn written by Nat's errant father.
But it amounts to little. And we are left with a novel that is no more than a shopping list, on which the author has crossed everything off and the reader is left wondering where everything is.
Keith Ridgway is the author of Animals, published in paperback this month by Harper Perennial
South of the River By Blake Morrison Chatto & Windus, 520pp. £17.99