Pushing fifty and still pulling

Linda Grant begins her latest novel with a paean to Liverpool ("The city spoke in tongues and when it didn't speak it shouted") and ends it with a bout of rampant sex ("I pushed her back on the couch and pulled her panties off "). I suspect that she intended in Still Here to interweave the story of the city's changing fortunes "from industrial hell to post-industrial hell by way of slavery, sugar and Brian Epstein" with a quasi-autobiographical family saga (she was herself brought up in Liverpool).

But somehow she was hijacked by her two main characters, Alix Rebick and Joseph Shields, who took over the action, reducing what began as a serious fiction into a bonkbuster for the over-50s. Alix, a Liverpudlian Jew, is 49 going on 50, a predatory female with "a lust problem", or perhaps I should say a bust problem.

She made the most of the advent of the Pill back in the late Sixties but is now bitter that feminism has beached her, with sagging breasts, flabby arms, and no man to ease the transition into old age. Joseph, an American architect in his fifties, is in Liverpool, minus wife, to build a fancy hotel.

He is unreconstructed testosterone through and through: "There is a cuteness I adore in women that makes me want to cuddle them like I cuddled my kids until they got too big and broke free of my arms, embarrassed by me." Alix has come back home to be with her dying mother, whose last words to her, in German, are "Get the factory back".

The factory, which was in Dresden and manufactured a miracle face-cream, was handed over to the Nazis by Alix's grandparents in exchange for their lives. Her mother was put on a train for England, aged 14, with all her worldly goods in a tiny suitcase, together with six pots of this elixir, Violette Schimmer (Violet Lustre - actually a mixture of paraffin oil and menthol). She marries a Jewish doctor, who rescues the cream from obscurity and makes a fortune for his children.

I'm sure that Linda Grant, who began writing as a journalist, wanted to tell of the horrors experienced by the Jews, and the plight of immigrants, and the injustices inflicted on the poor, and the evils of war (there's a vivid account of the bombing of Dresden), but Alix and Joseph, once created on the page, proved more compelling. Her last book, the Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times was a plangent account of the events that led to the creation of Israel in 1946-48 with a love story thrown in.

It just about worked as a novel because of Grant's powerful engagement with her subject, and her ability to evoke a response. But the issues that really engage her in Still Here are all to do with the failure of feminism, and in comparison are so dreary and self-obsessed.

Alix and Joseph are cut-outs, designed to etch sharply the battlelines of the war between the sexes that preoccupied and emasculated the second half of the last century. They have none of the contradictions and complexities that make us real; none of the subtleties that make a novel.

Anyway, I refuse to believe that a woman of Alix's supposed intelligence would spend quite so long on her make-up (though it's a brilliantly detailed description). Nor that once a woman is over 40 she is past it.

Kate Chisholm is 49.