Hanif Kureishi’s new novel joins a growing band of ‘contemporary chronicles’, in which the whole shape and structure of the novel derives from recent history, from the 1970s to the start of the new millennium, as if those developments have been so all engrossing, so fast moving, and so overwhelming, that any further plot a novelist invents can only be subsidiary to that dramatic unfolding of events.

I am reminded of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, of Blake Morrison’s South of the River, of Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions, all set against this same sequence of events; but then I remember Kureishi’s own The Buddha of Suburbia, and realise that he was in at the start of this trend in 1990, rather than joining in at this later stage.

So we relive all those social and political developments, with a kind of amiable sense of recognition: ‘like everyone in Britain, Mother had made more money from property than she had from working’; ‘even the brothels are multicultural now’; and later ‘the Cross Keys would be sold and converted into a pub selling basil risotto and Spanish bottled beers with diced limes jammed in the top’. These cultural mappings are mixed with more hard-hitting reflections on the political, racial, religious and sexual shifts in society over this period.

Then there are walk-on parts for various familiar celebrities, and plenty of namedropping, to remind us we’re in the world of the New Musical Express: teenagers have photos of their fathers ‘ripped from the newspaper’, rather than family snapshots on the wall; one character’s habit of ‘buying novels’ actually meant she was buying the film rights, not a heap of books; and one reference I particularly enjoyed was to ‘the children of rock’n’rollers we’d worshipped in the 60s, now comprising a new dynasty, and resembling in their “social capital” the great noble families of the ancien regime’. We also recognise the personal landmarks of Kureishi’s own family situation, with a Pakistani father married to an English mother, the strong sister figure, the close bond with his son, the hero as philosopher turned psychoanalyst, and the setting firmly rooted in the landscape of West London. He even casts in characters from his own previous scripts, as Omar and Karim enter the stage.

But what of any further plot to this new novel? It’s almost deliberately incidental and absurd, with an unresolved murder case leaving only a slight pall of guilt over the concerned parties, and a stolen drawing which finally gets back into the right hands; none of which distracts our attention from the more scene-stealing events of the contemporary backdrop. And the characters and relationships? I failed to believe in any of the three women our hero was supposedly torn between: the dialogue with his intended Indian love Ajita had none of the credibility of the post-gig encounter with Mick Jagger at Claridge’s. The only relationship that convinced me was between Jamal and his young son, which was so tender and tactile that you knew it came straight from the heart.

So where does the novel leave us? It takes us on the kind of ‘where were you’ journey, from Thatcher through to Tavistock Square, from charmed youth through to the first deaths of his generation; but Kureishi’s skills lie in his fine observation and sharp allusions to period detail, rather than in any literary language or sensitivities of character.