Two nations and three novels

Tim Pears has managed to complete his epic panorama of life in modern Britain - despite all the joys of fatherhood.

Gabriel holds the floor, resplendently pleased with himself in his three-wheeled buggy. I have arrived in Tim Pears's flat in Jericho, Oxford's smartly bohemian district, tired from weeks of campaigning for the local elections in Nottingham. I'm keen to press Pears on his view; on the way, I have scurried past a rash of Liberal Democrat posters, flanking the venerable working-class portals of Ruskin College, on my way from the station. Has there been much political upset here? Ye-es, he replies. What is the balance of power now? He looks to his wife, Hania, for confirmation. Well, Andrew Smith, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, used to be a lone blob of red on the generally blue map of this area, and that's all changed, he begins patiently, focusing intently on Gabriel - who blinks supportively and starts an important new game with my little finger.

Tim Pears's face glazes with affection when speaking of his nine-month-old son, who has just rumbled the technique of crawling forwards on all fours rather than, to the baby's own curious surprise, backwards. Life has modulated pleasurably around the demands of fatherhood. Pears used to be much more outgoing but is now happy to spend less time out of the house. He still writes, not in the flat, but in a two-storey building at the end of the garden.

The lower room is congested with a bucolic menagerie of garden tools; but climbing into the upper room, its high rafters glowingly lit with afternoon sun, we move into the serene calm of a workshop. Its striking feature is an entire wall lined with books. A hi-fi tumbles out some brassy jazz as Pears makes tea, but his vinyl collection still includes such spiky counter-classics as the Clash's Sandinista. A tiny computer occupies the dingiest corner, to which Pears eventually retires after writing longhand drafts of his substantial novels.

None could accuse Pears of slightness as a writer. His new novel, A Revolution of the Sun (Doubleday, £16.99), weighs in at almost 450 pages, and his previous two displayed a clear preference for writing on the panoramic scale. Together, the three make up an English trilogy which, he says, is a "social chronicle". "I'm interested in the interweaving of the personal lives of individual people with wider trends and greater events, and how they interact."

His much-applauded first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was a mazy, semi-autobiographical tale set in a Devon village largely based on the one in which he grew up. Pears acknowledges that while the novel was a tremendous success, it may not have been read in the way he had expected.

"I left school at 16 and didn't study English at A-level or university, so the books and films that I grew up enjoying tended to be Eastern European rather than English, perhaps because my dad had a lot of Russian novels in his study." Pears's father, a vicar, appears as the rector in the novel. "I imbibed the idea of art having political metaphors buried within it to escape censorship. In writing that first novel, I was very much trying to create a microcosm of society in a place where you'd least expect it to be, a small village hidden away in the country in Devon.

"But for me it very much was meant to reflect what was happening in the wider world in1984. It was intended to be a portrait of the Eighties, with the teachers' and miners' strikes brought up now and again as political events in the background." He views that decade as "characterised by greed, and the promotion of greed and selfishness as perfectly worthwhile values, and engines of society. That's explored in what happens within this family. It is the greed of the older brother which breaks up the basic family and the farm itself."

If a Cider with Rosie atmosphere of distant upheavals menacing a sequestered rite of passage prevailed in his début, Pears's second novel, In a Land of Plenty, brought themes of personal and public morality to the fore through the dynastic fortunes of an industrialist's family. "It's certainly more explicit," Pears agrees. "It's still a family saga, but the members of the family are also representatives of the elements of society in a very obvious way."

A Revolution of the Sun extrapolates this style further by abandoning the naturalism of his previous novel in favour of satire. His former hesitancy about politics disappears. "It is based very purposefully in 1997, election year, when a lot changed," he says. "The relief of that election was quite phenomenal. However briefly that euphoria lasted, it was shared by an enormous number of people. It was an amazing moment. I wanted to capture that, to describe the run-up to it and, to some extent, the fall-out and the scepticism that followed it."

The England chronicled in A Revolution of the Sun is a much more fragmented society, in which many disparate themes and plots are wound tightly together to produce the cathartic family unit of loners at the novel's close. "There are so many ways for us to identify ourselves now," Pears explains. "We are a lot of different tribes, and I wanted to interweave as many stories as I thought a novel could hold."

Gone is the patriotic England of the 1966 World Cup or the Ministry of Supply. Instead, Pears uses drug-dealing, burglary, vivisection, dubious politics, spiritualism and compassion to express a social crisis.

"A century ago", he reflects, "people knew their place in the structure of society. Thankfully, that has dissipated a great deal, but for a long time there was what could be described as a consensus in mainstream politics - that society was a whole unit, and that it was going to be gradually raised from the bottom. Thatcherism broke this up by saying that there was no such thing as society. I think it's terribly sad - we have this widening, enriched middle class, and a disenfranchised underclass. That's something I wanted to depict."

Revolution doesn't drag its moral gravity wearily along, though. The characters are warm and involved, even if each does carry some stock baggage. Some characters are almost lampoons. "It is satire," Pears excuses himself. "Perhaps I wanted to be more playful because ultimately it does have a bleaker vision." Roderick Pastille, a smug Tory defence secretary from a migrant family, with a flopping lock of hair and sensuous lips, is chief among them. Pears absolutely refuses to admit that this glorious creation was modelled upon a particular frontbencher.

The darkest satire centres on The Laboratory, a sinister research centre where animal experimentation gradually gives way to experimenting on students, to see what Brueghelesque mutations they will inflict on animals in the supposed pursuit of scientific truth. It reminded me of Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, which suggested that 65 per cent of subjects would act to harm others simply because they were told to do so.

"That's fascinated me for years," Pears comments, "the so-called neutrality of scientists and the ability to hide one's conscience... We're on the verge of an explosion of genetic and transgenic experimentation with animals. I'm reading loads of stuff now about GM developments for the next novel," he adds.

Pears says his fourth novel will be a departure from the English trilogy, but I cannot see him abandoning his grand themes of social and political morality. Perhaps fatherhood will manage to rein in his panoramic vision, or at least slow him down? "Actually, Gabriel's arrival has improved my productivity," he remarks nonchalantly, glancing back up the stairs to his workshop. But he doesn't say how.