A writers' retreat is blown apart by a beauty

ANYONE who still thinks comic books aren't for grown-ups should have a look at Tamara Drewe. About five minutes should be enough to change even the most stubborn mind.

A year or so ago, readers of The Guardian's Saturday review were treated to weekly instalments of Posy Simmonds's new work: an everyday story of literary folk and the things they get up to. Now, expanded, updated and embellished, it gets the full hardback, almost coffee-table-book, treatment.

And if you don't know what I mean by "the things they get up to", the front cover shows a couple of sheep rutting discreetly in the background, behind the large drawing of Simmonds's beautiful heroine.

Stonefield is a rural retreat for writers: nominally presided over by Nicholas Hardiman, best-selling writer of superior thrillers, the place is run in fact by his wife Beth, the kind of woman who routinely attracts the prefix "long-suffering".

For not only does Nicholas do no daily chores, he is also a regular and successful adulterer who largely gets away with it because he doesn't conceal his affairs from his wife.

This is not a recipe for long-term felicity. There's a wonderful moment early on when Beth loses her patience with him and starts screaming in Stonefield's courtyard. "Ssh!" says Nicholas. "Godsake, we're surrounded by novelists!" But the situation is made worse when the staggeringly gorgeous Tamara moves into her deceased mother's home nearby. We are then given a plot of operatic complexity, as people lose their hearts and heads to her; prank emails are sent, photos are surreptitiously taken on mobiles; and eventually, a toxic mixture of lust, boredom and Hardyesque ill-fortune results in a double tragedy.

And yet, even though the book's climax involves death, it ends on a gentle, forgiving pastoral note. Tamara Drewe might be easy to read but it is a rich, complex work that commands full attention. The argument over whether the graphic novel can compete with the literary novel would, with Tamara Drewe, now seem to be over. A plot which, in hands less skilled than a Nabokov's, might seem trite and hackneyed here comes over as fresh and gripping. And this is because it is composed of drawings, not in spite of the fact. Much of the work takes place inside people's heads, whether as memory or speculation: rather like our own lives. Expressing this can be tortuous with only words; with a cartoon, all you need is a well-placed thought bubble.

The trick is in the words "well-placed" and Simmonds never puts a foot wrong.

Her technique is so subtle it hardly draws attention to itself: it is flexible, graceful and fluid. Not only is she capable of the most telling detail (the Giles cartoon book in the loo, the graffiti on the country bus shelter), she is also a confident artist of the tellingly vague long-shot, where you can only distinguish people by their postures.

She can do beauty Tamara's entrance actually stops the reader's breath and she can do plainness, tenderly conscious of the anxiety a middle-aged woman might feel when confronted by a younger rival. There was once an accusation levelled at Simmonds that she was too cosily middleclass.

Indeed, she can skewer the bourgeoisie's pretensions with a precision only deep intimacy can confer; yet here she is just as acute on the failings of celebrity culture, the skewed economy of rural England or the pressures on single mothers.

In short, Simmonds can do both exteriors and interiors. She knows what goes on in the head of a portly American academic on a sabbatical, and a giddy, bored 15-year-old girl with a crush on a rock star. She gives every character her full, attentive respect.

Which isn't something you can say of many novelists.