Prospect Hill by Richard Francis

A bracing dose of provincial realism

Like its predecessor, Fat Hen (1998), Richard Francis's new work is an inspired attempt at reinventing that time-limned genre, the English provincial novel. Plot, theme, some of the humour, would not seem out of place in ancient books by Stan Barstow or Keith Waterhouse. Yet underpinning them is a significant shift in perspective.

Set at the fag-end of the first Wilson government, with a general election in the offing, Prospect Hill deals with an era that is now practically a third of a century old. It is to his credit that what emerges suffers neither from our own or the author's ulterior knowledge of what really went on, or from the faint patina of the period piece.

In fact, the novel's cast occupy a category rarely found in a historical novel: believable, rooted in a distinctive bygone environment, they are sufficiently connected to the world of the contemporary reader to stir recognition and sympathy. Politics, in this case the planned high-rise development on the Greater Manchester site that gives the book its title, draws the middle-aged Tory councillor May Rollins, the young bank clerk-cum-aspiring Labour MP Trevor Morgan, and the womanising estate agent Art Whiteside together. The neatly stoked atmosphere of council-chamber skulduggery and casual corruption is only a backdrop to the unpacking of a great deal of interior baggage.

The delicacy with which Francis unravels May's relationship with her demented mother Hilda, whose vocal contributions are limited to elderly pop songs, or the fractures of Trevor and his wife Chris's marriage, can occasionally turn disconcerting. Part-comic, built on the low-level intimacy of people who communicate in their own private codes, Prospect Hill is suffused with melancholy. Some of the best scenes come when the characters confide things to each other: Trevor's anguished colleague at the bank revealing that he is terminally ill; his mother disclosing that she has cancer. "What sort?" Trevor wonders. Mrs Morgan can only mouth the word "breast" back at him before reverting to an odd gesture from his childhood, sticking her hands in front of her face and popping up from behind them to shout "boo".

In the end, the novel's skeins are wound together by a single act of drama – an aeroplane crash with a sole but salient fatality. Thirty years ago, critics would complain of the "classic" English provincial novel that its realism was simply too realistic, ever descending towards drabness. Richard Francis's achievement is to pluck ordinary lives out of their routine by concentrating on their sheer oddity. Nothing could be more conventional than the paths his characters tread; at the same time, nothing could be more bizarre. Despite occasional overstretchings of the material, Prospect Hill is a bracing experience.

The reviewer's biography of George Orwell will be published by Chatto & Windus in July