Fumbling for right touch in Larkshire

Larkshire, Jilly Cooper's fictitious county in the English West Country, is not a restful place. Life there is gorgeous or ghastly, blissful or bloody. You could say nothing in Cooper's Larkshire goes off at half-cock, except her fey old charmer Sir Raymond Belvedon, whose manhood is the size of a frozen shrimp.

But this novel, hung on the art world, is also set in the London of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. Cooper explores beyond her usual territory to prong with satire Hoxton's Young British Art crowd.

Raymond Belvedon is fighting in wartime France when he liberates a Raphael painting of Pandora. For decades it hangs in secret in his Lark-shire country house. Raymond becomes an old-fashioned art dealer, a television celebrity and all-round sweetie.

Despite his shrimp, he acquires a large and quarrelsome family, all gifted, all glam.

There are rows, incestuous crushes and endless bonking. Knees have not trembled so much since the days when Boy Scouts wore shorts in winter.

Temptation, as with Pandora's box, leads to misfor-tune. American Zachary Ansteig arrives to seduce Belvedons and imperil Pandora. Zachary, the Star of David glinting in his dark and hairy chest, is searching for a Raphael his family lost under the Third Reich. Larkshire lurches from paradise to legal purgatory.

Cooper's plot becomes operatic in its improbable complexities. Absurd? Yes. But the pace is so frenetic that you never have time to dwell mood-ily on the over-ripe coincidences. Cooper's energy is infectious.

She hurls in some deft human observations - memorial services being "an increasing chore of the much younger wife", first kisses that taste "of brandy and After Eights" and the embarrassment of a young man who is sent out to buy what-nots from the village shop. "How much is Tampax?" shouts the counter assistant, at full volume. Hideous. We've all been there, chaps, haven't we? Cooper sentences come complete with hot and cold running adjectives, not least when she is describing the weather. "Black fluffy clouds with pearly grey linings were advancing on a primrose- yellow moon." Houses are honey-coloured and hallways smell of beeswax and dog-sick.

Randy Rupert Campbell-Black, showjumper, plutocrat and a long-standing favourite with Cooper fans, makes another appearance. I would not have minded a little more of Larkshire's Lord-Lieutenant, General Aldridge - so dreary that he is known as General Anaesthetic. He takes out a subscription to the Erotic Review because his memsahib has hit the menopause.

Raphael 's bewitching artistry is a contrast to the young BritArt oafs. The only problem is that Cooper's mocking satires of the latter are artistically more intriguing than the drivel often peddled by Charles Saatchi. She imagines a video installation of a masturbating granny entitled "Oh Nan". How long before someone nicks the idea?

At 558 pages Pandora will keep you amused for days. Cooper's last two novels received some sour notices and it was suggested that the great bonkbusterist was losing her nimble touch. With Pandora she is back on nostril-flaring, leg-splaying top form.