Troubled waters (So London magazine)

South of the River by Blake Morrison, Chatto and Windus, £17.99

This May, as every sentient adult with a television or radio knows, sees the 10th anniversary of Tony Blair’s first short, sunlit walk down Downing Street. They know this because the anniversary programmes began, as is now the custom, more than two months early. It’s very important to try to get your message in – about how the country has become stressed and over-competitive – before the other guy does.

Ten years ago, we had never heard of iPods, YouTube, broadband or disillusionment. Now, everyone is plugged into a Nano and everyone is disillusioned, including those who claimed most loudly never to have had any illusions.

This fashion has become so ubiquitous that I’d not been looking forward to the inevitable onset of bilious non-fiction accounts of the Blair Years, let alone the ‘satires’ and dramatists’ takes on just how disappointed/betrayed the artist of 2007 feels by the politics of the past decade.

So I made a sort of resolution not to read anything or go to anything that promised to be a reflection on the passing era of Tony Blair.

Then along came Blake Morrison’s book, whose blurb mentions something about looking beneath the ‘bright familiar world of Blair’s Britain [where] there’s a dark undertow of political and personal disillusion, of mythologies and urban myths that circle round our apparently comfortable lives’.

Pleasantly, it turns out to be about something altogether different to a series of outspoken authorial lectures on the fabulist in Number 10.

True, one of Morrison’s characters manages to be mildly angry about the Bush-Blair relationship at a time when Bush had only been in the White House for three weeks, but this tells you far more about him than it does about New Labour or US neoconservatives or any of the other modish demons.

And that is what is so good about Morrison. He has always been a painfully honest writer, as first shown in his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? in which he invariably avoids the simple, slidey escape routes that so many authors choose to take.

South of the River, Morrison’s latest offering, then, turns out not to be an easy, angry consumers’ guide to Blairism, but an exploration of aspects of Blair’s Britons – the men and women who came to middle age during his premiership; the people he sought to govern and whose attitudes and needs have, of course, ended up governing him.

Morrison follows five different yet connected characters on and around five separate dates between election night 1997 and May 2002. At the book’s heart is another writer, Nat – a self-centred, babyish, fond charmer whose book is never, ever finished and who is a Casaubon for our times. Nat is married to Libby, a mother and career woman who is making her way in the advertising world; he is moving from critic to player, and he is having an affair with eco-aware would-be author Anthea, a much younger and rootless tree officer for the local council. The quintet is completed by Nat’s friend and ex-pupil Harry, a black journalist on a local newspaper, and Nat’s country uncle Jack, who runs a failing engineering company in East Anglia, and whose own wife hasn’t long to live.

They are all searching for their true selves. Anthea, in the modern way, seeks to become a radical without first possessing the slightest hint of a political opinion or interest in history, and ends up in the Middle East. Harry is angry, but he doesn’t really know what about, Nat wants and doesn’t want fame, Libby wants and doesn’t want to get ahead in advertising. Only Jack, master of the to-be-banned foxhounds, has any authentic notion of himself, even if it is crusted over with inhibition.

Interestingly for a sympathetic character, it is Jack who most approves of Blair’s tough foreign policy. If it were left to the others there could have been no second Labour landslide in 2001, let alone victory in 2005.

Morrison’s dysfunctional cast indicates the confusing times we inhabit, in which tolerance and betrayal, unprecedented communication and myopia, individual hope and collective fear all cohabit.

In each case the characters turn out to be their own worst enemies, and the greatest threats to their happiness come from their disguised selves. In each case they move through crisis to discover a better idea of who they really are. This prompts the speculation that perhaps the emotionally literate Morrison has been in therapy.

If so, he must entertain on the couch, for into the stories Morrison has worked one extraordinary poetic theme: that of the fox. Anthea is obsessed by foxes, Jack hunts them, one character discovers a long-lost erotic story about fox-like humans, Libby looks like one, and Harry believes that urban foxes are stealing black children.

The fox – lonely, furtive, smart, tricky, adaptable and elemental – becomes the embodiment of ourselves today.

Does that sound like anyone you know?