The realm of brilliance

Virginia Woolf's long battle with madness and despair provides the structure and inspiration for Michael Cunningham's outstanding new novel, The Hours (4th Estate, £12.99 in UK).

Not only is this a beautiful, moving work, and a technically adroit one, it is also an exciting consolidation of Cunningham's undoubted gifts, which were obvious from his his second novel, A Home at the End of the World (1990) and its successor, Flesh and Blood (1995).

As early as that ambitious second novel, with its complicated exploration of sexuality, Cunningham demonstrated a flair for describing the complex small dramas of life, through an elegant prose style exuding an effortless grace rarely evident in contemporary fiction. Not only did Flesh and Blood defy the legendary difficulties of a following a successful early book, but confirmed his increasing maturity.

This new novel in its quiet, meticulously observed and thoughtful way is a major achievement from a writer who has earned every word of praise yet directed at him. In a daring device he draws on the well-known story of Woolf's depression and eventual suicide, taking the known facts and assembling an account of the English novelist's final hours. There is an urgency in the writing throughout, but especially in these sequences, with their tone of bewildered control. In the flash-forward prologue he watches Woolf as she walks into the river, and he proceeds to describe a surreal odyssey as if it were a Chagall painting. "She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of brown, granular light."

The book moves further back in time, to Richmond, a place of exile for the unhappy Woolf, who has become a prisoner to both her own demons and to her husband, Leonard's loving but strict concern. We see her through Leonard's eyes: "She stands tall, haggard, marvelous in her housecoat . . . she has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin . . . She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful." Preoccupied with writing the work which would become Mrs Dalloway, Cunningham's Woolf experiences the return of the headaches and unease which previously haunted her.

It is "this realm of relentless brilliance", that of art, that provides the stage for her ghosts. Madness and genius walk together. Woolf must also contend with her stroppy housekeeper and her dazzling sister, Vanessa, arriving two hours early for a planned visit. All of this is reported with poise and understatement.

The discovery of a dead thrush by her visiting nephews and niece directs Woolf towards a meditation on mortality, as she ponders the tiny corpse, "tiny even for a bird, so utterly unalive, here in the dark, like a lost glove, this little empty handful of death . . . She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest." Her likening of her madness to a devil - "the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil is a fin breaking through dark waves" - is unnervingly exact.

Meanwhile, moving slowly but with a sense of purpose through 1990s New York, is Clarissa Vaughan. In common with Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, she is in the act of preparing a party. This celebration is to mark a literary prize to be awarded to one of her life-long friends, Richard, a former lover, who is gay and dying. This is the man who long ago nicknamed her "Mrs Dalloway". Fearing that she may be a trivial figure, composed, maternal Clar issa, who has a female lover, is both self-doubting and assured.

The literary world evoked is bitchy but it is also cowering under the threat of AIDS. Unlike David Leavitt, who also writes about gay life, and whose emergence as a writer was similar, Cunningham has avoided narrowness by employing a greater narrative range in writing about the same subject.

While the interleaved scenes of Richmond and New York unfold, there is a further life to be explored. Laura, a young, somewhat dissatisfied and again pregnant housewife in 1940s Los Angeles, loves her husband, loves her small son, also plans a party while she would clearly prefer to be reading Mrs Dalloway.

The Hours has the grace of a ballet; the characters shimmer and quest, each in a specific section of fractured time. It is a prism. Through the narrative, with its assortment of intense stories, the author makes a persuasive exploration of time, love, loyalties and creativity. Cunningham is operating at such a high level of art that the connections are invisible; more importantly, the coincidences are subtle, surprising and powerful. It is unusual for a novelist to say so much so economically. Although this novel does not depend on contacts and connections, such is the quality of the prose that he can draw upon shocks and revelations with the assurance of a thriller writer.

Not only is The Hours a major achievement for Cunningham, it is important for fiction. Here is a novel written at the end of the century, a novel about endings, which also confers a much needed weight and profundity to the business of reading fiction as much as to the writing of it.