A cool, complacent, unconvincing voice

Fiction:Few writers do voice better than Graham Swift, one of Britain's most consistently original writers. Voice has always been important to his fiction, and watching its emerging dominance over the course of what is a major literary career has proved interesting.

It has been the progression of a device, which went from an effective element to an essential one in his 1996 Booker prize-winning Last Orders. With that novel, Swift, a novelist who has always asked questions but rarely presumes to offer answers, demonstrated his developing fascination with how people live. His earlier work, most specifically his finest book, Waterland (1983), and his most underrated book, Ever After (1992), both testify to his feel for history and the past; notions and ideas.

Then, with Last Orders, he found his natural home. South London, its people and their dreams and failures, the stepping stones that have brought them to the place they now occupy, by choice or chance. Last Orders, one man's story, with particular emphasis on one man's war, was a multi-voiced narrative. It is an odyssey into the respective pasts of a small group of Londoners as they join together to fulfil the dying wishes of a pal. As a novel it was important for Swift as it finally helped him to move beyond the significant achievement that is Waterland. In The Light of Day (2003), he moved this notion of voice a step further. Beyond the comedy and pathos of Last Orders, with its cast of characters all recalling their pal, Jack Dodds, who has died, leaving them with the task of bringing his ashes to Margate Pier, is George, the bewildered narrator who is besotted by a woman who may have killed her husband. George, fallen policeman, abandoned husband and now private investigator, spends a day pondering the changes brought about by his involvement in an adultery case.

Paula, the narrator of Swift's new novel, Tomorrow, lies awake one June night pondering what the next day will bring. It is obvious that a revelation is about to be made: "I'm the only one awake in this house on this night before the day that will change all our lives." Odd, from the very first page, you get the feeling that Paula's revelation can only be about one thing - paternity. The question then is: does it matter that it is so easy to guess the nature of her secret? Well, there is more to it than that - this is a woman speaking, addressing her children, as she would like to, rather than would. But it fails to convince. Her sexual candour is not beguiling, it is off-putting. But then, Swift is under no obligation to please the reader.

In The Light of Day, George has a distinctive voice, as well as an individual style of delivery. He tells the story in a style that is true to himself. The son of a high-street photographer, George falls for a woman who employs him to track her erring husband. George's client is married to a gynaecologist. She is a college lecturer as well as a translator, and represents a world that impresses George. Old George is real, a middle-aged man who has tried his best yet somehow usually gets it wrong. As his hostile teenage daughter announces, "You're a detective, Dad. But you don't see things. You don't notice things". There is an immense warmth to George's story. He engages by force of his humanity.

PAULA IS A much cooler character. Her life has been dominated by the ease with which she met Mike, her husband of 25 years. They met while at college, and now he runs a successful science magazine and she is an art dealer. Their family consists of twins, a boy and a girl. Paula mourns her father, a High Court judge who was married three times, and admits to having had a poor relationship with her mother.

Tomorrow never draws the reader in. Paula is not sympathetic. She is a confident woman, now approaching 50 and aware of having been able to charm men most of her life. Her relationship with Mike, a shadowy but far more humane individual, is rooted in sex. Only rarely does Paula move beyond sex and look at a wider view: "One has to count so many things in life. Days, hours, minutes. Years, birthdays. Money. The miles between places. How many metres you'll need for those new curtains. Calories, pounds, blood pressure, heart rate . . . " Elsewhere she observes that "There are points in our lives which, if we don't know it at the time, we look back on later and see ourselves as if suspended, poised on some mysterious fulcrum". Her memories are about sexual excitement, followed by the failure to conceive naturally and their attempts to counter nature. Mike has a problem, and as she repeatedly informs her children, "I am your mother". Her handling of the facts in relation to her husband are strangely clinical: "Your father isn't your father. He's going to tell you himself. Who better?" Smug Paula is able to keep herself out of every mess, for her perfect twins represent her triumph, her competence. Yet again, Swift may deliberately have set out to create a woman who is not a saint, or even particularly nice. But it is not this that stifles the novel; it is the flatness of it. But there is one dramatic episode that brilliantly evokes that state of numb detachment that can take over at a moment of crisis.

Late in the narrative, Paula remembers the day a visit to the beach almost ended in a tragedy. Both parents suddenly become alert, asking of the children "where are they?". The twins had been swimming and both were in difficulty. By chance, Mike notices, and though the weaker swimmer, orders Paula to stay on shore as he tries to save them and does, one by one. It is the strongest sequence in the novel and Swift captures the chill feeling of a close escape. But aside from this, Tomorrow is an oddly artificial book; aside from its unconvincing narrator, the story pivots on the injustice of Mike's parenting suddenly being cancelled due to a biological technicality.

Facts are only facts; the ultimate failure of the narrative lies in Paula's cool, complacent and disengaged tone. It is impossible to believe in this woman, as Swift does not seem overly convinced himself.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Tomorrow By Graham Swift Picador, 248pp. £16.99