There are lots of lies and secrets and betrayals, but most of all there’s a sense of missed chances. There’s a phrase that really stuck in my mind, “If we could see and choose”. Meaning that all the characters had ideas of themselves as young men, ideas of who they wanted to be. Jack wanted to be a doctor, Ray a jockey, Lenny a boxer. But then things got in the way: the war, family, health, and a hundred other reasons why things didn’t work out the way they should have done. If we could see the way everything would pan out and choose based on the outcomes, things would be very different. But we can’t. We choose based on what seems best at the time, or easiest, or what other people want us to do. And sometimes we don’t really get to choose at all. And so our lives are not what we would have chosen, but what we end up with.

The novel, which won the 1996 Booker Prize, is written from multiple perspectives. The voice of each character is believable, with working class language and speech patterns (the opening line, for example, goes “It aint your regular sort of day”). This book is a good reminder that language doesn’t have to be correct to be beautiful. I think it’s quite hard to do it well, and if you get it wrong then too much dialect of any kind can be quite annoying. The only other book I can think of where I liked the dialect and found it not only believable but beautiful was The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Graham Swift, like Walker, manages it perfectly: even though he went to the same posh public school as I did, and Cambridge after that, there’s never a moment when his Bermondsey slang rings false.

It’s a maudlin kind of book, again appropriately – not just because of the death at the centre but because of the pubs that feature so heavily throughout. It feels like the sort of story you’d be told by an old man sitting at the bar nursing his half-finished pint on a slow Tuesday afternoon in one of those old-fashioned pubs where there’s no music or TVs to drown out the melancholy thoughts that quiet drinking can bring on. You can feel the longing in the characters, sad and resigned to what their lives have become but still remembering what they would have done, if only they could see and choose.

Why didn’t I believe it? For me, the character was too extreme. Plenty of people get bored with their partners and leave them. But things like leaving Susan in the hospital after she’s given birth to his first son, taking the champagne her father has left for her and drinking it with his girlfriend? Ending one section by thinking to himself ‘Cheerio, bitch’? Apparently feeling no guilt at all for abandoning his two young sons, even though he is aware of the horrible effects it will have on them from conversations with his friends Victor (who has also left his wife and kids, one of whom tried to kill himself) and Asif (who is a teacher of many kids who’ve been damaged by their parents)? All this is too much to believe, as are some of Jay’s reported sexual exploits with younger women, which sound more like a middle-aged male writer’s pornographic fantasies than the believable actions of the character Jay. It feels as if Kureishi is straining very hard to make Jay as reprehensible as possible. Clearly he is trying to convey a sense of the isolation and lack of moral compass that many people feel, as well as the sexual frustration and powerlessness that many men feel in a feminist age, particularly those old enough to have been brought up in a more male-dominated world. But I think in trying to do so he goes too far, and makes Jay more of a caricature than a character.

What I liked about the book, actually, were the parts that sounded less like fiction and more like an essay on the social development of Britain from the seventies to the nineties. For example he characterises his generation (those who came of age in the seventies) as ‘particularly priveleged and spoilt’, enjoying the freedom won by their elders in the sixties before the ‘cruelties of the eighties.’ He talks of the political convictions of his generation, ‘the last generation to defend communism’, but also of its inability to see the appeal of Thatcherism and therefore to fight it effectively. ‘We were left enervated and confused. Soon we didn’t know what we believed. Some remained on the left; others retreated into sexual politics; some became Thatcherites. We were the kind of people who held the Labour Party back. Still, I never understood the elevation of greed as a political credo. Whey would anyone want to base a political programme on bottomless dissatisfaction and the impossibility of happiness? Perhaps that was its appeal: the promise of luxury that in fact promoted endless work.’

I think he really has captured some important ideas here, and in other similar monologues. But between the islands of political and social truth there is a sea of very unbelievable fiction. While it was not a struggle to get through it, I wouldn’t say it was particularly rewarding either.