As it Happened, by David Storey

DJ Taylor watches in amazement as the Hampstead intellectual novel comes back to life

Thirty years ago there was a vogue for what used to be called the "Hampstead novel" but could be more accurately termed the "post-Bloomsbury novel". The people who roamed around in it had no time for "adventures" (at any rate non-sexual ones) in the old-fashioned sense; they simply talked. They could be as distinct in temperament as Margaret Drabble's brisk young adulterers or Iris Murdoch's donnish ruminators, but their forte was the same: the earnest discussion and the resonant epigram, with life conceived of as a philosophy seminar.

This is an exaggeration, perhaps, but not much. Presumably the people who once populated such novels – all those neurotic young women, intense young men and depressed elderly presences – are still with us. But they tend not to make it into commercial fiction now, which has become a thing of surface and design rather than interior rumblings. To find them all at large again in the 21st century is rather a shock: like elbowing aside the bracken of the Surrey Hills to stumble upon a lost world of pterodactyls taking flight into the evening sky.

Maddox, the emeritus art professor hero of David Storey's tenth novel, is a deeply old-fashioned figure, not merely in some of his professional judgments but in his predicaments. The end-of-the-tether motif is not what it was in fiction. A failed suicide, inexplicably prompted to throw himself in front of a tube train, with wife gone, children grown, semi-shacked up with a punctilious analyst, Simone, he attends art-therapy sessions with a collection of ancient depressives. His life is a constant attempt to clutch at meaning and extract purpose.

Tracking his dense conversations with Viklund, his elderly mentor, or his reflections on Eric Taylor, a star pupil now imprisoned for murder, the reader will probably find himself on a similar quest. Dragging its high seriousness like a banner, chewing over its metaphysical questions with a shamelessness not seen since mid-period Murdoch, As it happened is distinguished by a prose of labyrinthine complexity, with lots of italics and "inverted commas" doing service as elevator attendants, breathless, elliptical and only just on the right side of intelligibility. A splendid time is guaranteed on page 12, which contains a 19-line sentence with five colons, a brace of semi-colons, 32 commas, three parentheses. No doubt this is a fair representation of the way the average mind scurries about. The reader, alas, will struggle to keep up.

Even more curious is the sense of distance travelled. Though he made his name as a provincial realist – This Sporting Life (1960) sits up there with Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Sid Chaplin's The Day of the Sardine – Storey was not exclusively provincial nor realist. His second novel, about a schoolmistress who heads to the dilemmas of the big city, was the symbolically entitled Flight into Camden. The Booker-winning Savile (1976) may have been a more or less straightforward reprise of a South Yorkshire childhood, but Storey was drawn to a kind of super-realism, shading off into pastiche or beyond. The chapter in Present Times (1983) in which Attercliffe sits at his daughter's PTA listening to teachers parroting jargon are emblematic. Witheringly done, they lose the sharpness of personality found in the dialogues between This Sporting Life's Arthur Machin and his mistress Mrs Hammond.

The best scenes in As it happened continue to mine this hyper-realist lode: seen "as they are", but weighed down with supplementary freight. In one, Maddox confronts an intruder trying to make his way into the house of his drug-dealing neighbour. In another, he is effectively sacked by the arts editor of a broadsheet for supplying one piece of negative art criticism too many. Both are wonderfully edgy exchanges, set down with minimal fuss and verbiage, funny at times ("Your postscript, for instance, on the desultory nature of British public sculpture doesn't resonate well, either") but full of hidden intent and menace.

Ultimately, encounters of this kind – which continue until a passingly redemptive finale – are in grave danger of being stifled by the ebb and flow of Maddox's interior life. Fascinating in some of its incidentals, never free of the sensation of a sharp intelligence at work, As it happened offers in the end only the spectacle of a highly distinguished veteran author enjoying a conversation with that receptive but debilitating audience: himself.