Meandering through the boondocks

South of the River is a stadium-sized novel of over 500 pages. It has the scope and ambition of an American McNovel — Don DeLillo’s Underworld, say, or The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. At first it appears to be in narrative disarray, the plot leaping backwards and forwards in time. A theme soon emerges, however, as the disparate stories converge.

Touted by the publishers (or by the author) as ‘the big British novel of our times’, South of the River opens with Labour’s election victory in 1997 and chronicles the misfortunes of a south London family over a period of five years up to 2002. London south of the river has not been mapped in a novel of this bulk for some time. Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (a key work of the Thatcher- ite 1990s) explored the jagged riverscapes and industrial sumplands of London to the east. London Fields, the Martin Amis novel, unfolded in the outer reaches of the fashionable west.

Nat Raven, middle-aged and shambolic, is a failed playwright who teaches a writing course at a Thameside university near Greenwich. (Morrison himself, according to the dust jacket, teaches Creative Writing in south London.) His wife Libby is a high-powered advertising executive. Their marriage falls apart when Nat goes off with one of his pupils, Anthea, a gentle soul who writes mystic prose-poetry about foxes and other countryside creatures. Riven by pain at her husband’s betrayal, Libby has an affair in turn with a rather creepy man called Damian, who is younger and a lot more snazzy than Nat.

Along the way, Morrison shows a keen interest in the mechanics of flirting and sexual sizing-up, as well as the pros and cons of what he calls ‘doggy’ (as opposed to ‘missionary’ sex).