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.