We have, in the world of highbrow fiction, lived so long with the slipknots, slipslops and general slipsliding away slipshoddiness of postmodern novels, self-reflexive texts and unreliable narrators that it is sheer relief to read a novel like this. Neil Cross’s fourth novel wants to tell a honest tale about decent blokes and the reality of human emotions such as love and grief.

Undoubtedly Cross succeeds in the second of these aims: the relationship between the father, Sam, and the son, Jamie, following the death of their respective wife and mother, Justine, from fatal familial insomnia (the inability to sleep, caused by rogue prions in the brain) is described with a subtle, sure touch. Cross knows when to be raw and judges well when to let in a metaphor such as the tender, tactile description of a father’s take on motherhood: ‘Instead he recalled the woman who married him, the woman inside whom his son had budded, a secret efflorescence, a polyp unfolding from nothing, reaching for the sun’. Cross also knows how to write the mundane and when to let the narrative be still enough for that mundane to breathe: ‘The sun was going down. Somewhere, somehow, Saturday night was beginning … By now they were on the second bottle and were watching a gameshow whose rules were too arcane for him to grasp and too sadistic for him to believe’.

Surprisingly, it is his valiant effort to write decently about men doing - or failing to do - the right thing that both touches most and disappoints most. By today’s standards at least, school bullying and the attendant angst-ridden hand-wringing is run of the mill and sure-fire fodder for any number of teen lit stories, short films and episodes of Grange Hill. Cross’s innovation is to look at a child being bullied through the eyes of a loving parent, who wants to act and finds he can’t. And it is in the point of action that Always the Sun disappoints most. Now whether or not this is Neil Cross’s fault is a point to be debated, but I suspect that it is not, that if you aim to write a true account of somebody trying to act in today’s climate of caution and uncertainty about where authority lies, it is bound to be a difficult task, short on inspiration.

Apart from finding one too many plot devices veering towards the wrong side of implausibility in the last thirty or so pages, I remain convinced that this is a novel that sets out to tell a truth about society. And that truth seems to be that we are so petrified of action, that when we do act we lose all perspective and rationality.

Would we act as Sam eventually acts: having had the conversation with the school teacher whose hands are tied by bureaucracy, whose heart is full of ‘contempt’ for those towards whom he exercises a duty of care, whose life is ‘empty’; having tried to talk man-to-man to the father of the bully and found the mores of male conversation misunderstood, unable to cope with working man’s advice to ‘let them sort out between them’ due to his own Guardian reader’s liberal mistrust; feeling helpless, angry and humiliated? What do you do when there is no sense of trust in society and your faith in yourself fails you?

This is a novel that addresses not just modern manhood but contemporary society. Cross shows us a society set in the industrial estates and grass verges of the modern market town, a society where even a ‘man’s man’ can become so mistrustful of other men - particularly working class men together - that bullying is not seen as children negotiating their way into adulthood, but as a root cancer in a society where even the strongest are afraid and mistrustful of each other and resort to mindless thuggery rather than adult argument.

Not much social inspiration or humanist aspiration here. But that is not the question to ask about a contemporary novel. The question to ask is: is this a true picture of society truthfully depicted by a good author? Probably. But this purely literary question also poses another, wider, more acute question: can good authors ever write beyond the limits of their time.