South of the River, by Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison, poet and memoirist, is best known for writing with painful honesty about subjects close to home. His focus is intimate in books such as When Did You Last See Your Father? and Things My Mother Never Told Me, but he manages to invest domestic reminiscences with universal echoes. His new novel, in contrast to such intense miniatures, is painted on a big canvas with broad brush-strokes.

South of the River begins in May 1997 on the night of New Labour's landslide victory. It is self-consciously a novel for and of our times - a fictional reflection on the Blair years as the Prime Minister takes his final bow. The themes are plentiful, from racism, the decline of British manufacturing, moves to ban hunting and the shake-up in higher education to more personal concerns of ageing, infidelity and self-delusion.

Actual events are worked into a fictional setting. Early on, the TV in the background shows Tony and Cherie moving in to 10 Downing Street. Later, characters attend the glitzy launch of the Millennium Dome or agonise over the enquiry into the killing of Stephen Lawrence. There is even a treacherous New Labour MP trying to woo the countryside vote.

Morrison's chosen form is that of the saga. So the narrative progresses through the stories of five connected individuals whose own crises unfold as the country begins to have its doubts about a government in which many like them had invested so much. Although Morrison is experimenting with a new genre, the same skills he brought to his previous books remain much in evidence. It is his attention to the telling details that others might overlook, and ability to convey emotions as well as events, that hooks you and keeps you turning the pages.

Tragi-comic Nat, a mediocre playwright, fills his time with a bit of teaching and much ridiculous posturing while he waits for the theatrical world to knock at his door. His down-to-earth advertising executive wife, Libby, initially supports him in his delusions - and to an extent shares them - until she is disabused by his affair with his ex-student, the earnest and vapid Anthea. Nat's friend, Harry, is a local journalist who sees racist slights at every turn; and Nat's uncle, Jack, a bluff fox-hunting fanatic and Tory voter, owns a small engineering firm in Suffolk, in slow decline along with his marriage.

Morrison employs various devices to give shape and purpose to such a wealth of material. Some are conventional, like geography: much of the action takes place in urban south London, where plush middle-class ghettos exist cheek by jowl with the rough estates where Harry grew up.

More intriguing is Morrison's inclusion of extracts from the writings of his characters. It is a risky ploy, for none of the authors has much by way of literary merit. However, their prose makes the point that writing - or the urge to explain yourself on paper when you cannot do so by talking to others - is one thing that connects disparate individuals. Morrison gives it a nice twist by juxtaposing these ramblings with the outpourings of Nat, who can (just about) write, is happy to express himself at length, but, ultimately, has nothing to say.

Finally, there hovers throughout the narrative the shadowy figure of a fox. It gives the saga a hint of myth. There is, Morrison is saying, a darker truth behind talk of the prosperity of Blair's Britain. For those who like to pigeonhole their writers, this is Morrison breaking free: being populist and literary, simultaneously, and showing in the process that he can do something entirely different.

Peter Stanford's life of Cecil Day-Lewis appears next month from Continuum