Exercised by the need to establish exactly what was going on in Adam Thorpe’s long and accomplished new novel, I found myself making a list of the various fictional shapes into which Between Each Breath periodically morphs. First comes a relatively straightforward tale of deracination and upward mobility as practised by a lower-middle-class boy from Hayes taken up by a gang of Hampshire gentry. There follows a much less straightforward account of the consequences of a closely observed transcultural love affair. Lurking in the wings, meanwhile, is one of those time-honoured sagas of marital strife in Hampstead, albeit with a decisive contemporary twist. Then, almost silently, all these threads are gathered up into a superlatively edgy chronicle of the bomb-torn London of summer 2005 with a few angry laments over yob culture thrown in for good measure. Finally there is its continual focus on a territory in which the modern novel rarely lingers — the way in which a creative artist, in this case a musician, goes about his work.

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