Thatcher's converts and victims

Like his first novel, Tim Lott's second is about the national schism wrought by Thatcherism and, specifically, its impact on the English South-East. But where White City Blue was primarily driven by the anguish of character, Rumours of a Hurricane draws out Lott's desire to splatter the consequences of the 1980s across a social canvas.

An ordinary London couple, Charlie and Maureen Buck, live out the end of the 1970s in their Fulham council house under the expectation that their world is fixed, punctuated only by bouts of industrial action at Times Newspapers, where Charlie works as a compositor, blithely assuming that strikes will always be resolved, that back-pay will always be forthcoming, and that a "craftsman" like himself will always have a place in the world.

Charlie spends most of his life as an unreflecting Labour supporter. But after the British victory in the Falklands, he votes for Mrs Thatcher. He doesn't quite know why, but he likes her. It's a feeling that goes beyond his approval for the fight against Argentina. It's something in the gut. Charlie and Maureen have bought their council house and later sell it for an incomprehensible amount of money and move to Milton Keynes. Unknowingly, Charlie is the quintessential Thatcher convert. Equally unknowingly, he becomes her quintessential victim.

There is something desperate and margarine-thin about the Englishness which Maureen and Charlie accept as normality before their canter through the property charade. It is almost shocking to experience as relief the way Lott dramatises the boom of the Eighties. It becomes a matter for glee - the Thatcherite assault on unions which have descended into mafia-style corruption and local authorities which resemble little more than Soviet commissariats. For Maureen, it certainly comes as a liberation - she is the adaptable one. For Charlie, though, it spells the absolute doom of his world and every value he understands.

In the simple and credible dichotomy of the fates of Charlie and Maureen, Tim Lott seizes the irreconcilables of the Thatcherite legacy. Out of it he spins a bigger picture - of social turmoil, family division, racial and sexual convulsion. Cleanly and compulsively told, the story reaches to its conclusion of a death foretold with a satisfying and painful thunderclap of tragedy.

What there isn't in Rumours of a Hurricane is the vernacular velocity of White City Blue. Abandoning the internality of Frankie Blue's blue-collar self-hatred, Lott's language becomes flatter as he attempts to draw a more general picture of the "Subtopia" - Britain's new-town developments and population displacement. Just slightly, he loses verbal energy as the scope grows.

And yet the scope is still not quite big enough for this to become the novel which Lott almost promises, the grand novel of the 1980s. The denouement of the Wapping dispute, when it comes, is effectively vicious and brilliantly heightened by Charlie's unexpected confrontation with Robert, the son he always assumed was a loser. But it is not pulled off comprehensively.

The print union's dispute with Rupert Murdoch is the right vehicle for Lott's tragedy of Thatcherism. But you find yourself hungering to know more; both to get deeper inside the machinery of union intransigence and wider beyond to the national and political drama which eventually killed the storm.

You understand what went right for Maureen and what went wrong for Charlie, but not what went right and wrong for Britain.