It is this abiding force, this looming intelligence which gives the book its scope and its magnetism.Again and again, the author toys with real people and events, barely bothering to disguise them; there's Thomas Waldo Burke, the lazy junior minister who is besotted with Mrs Thatcher, an obsessive womaniser who "dreamed convulsively of the highest office". There's Reuben and Style plc, a dictatorial chain-store that dominates the underwear market. Or Jane's chairman, Lord Doncaster, who has grown rich on asset-stripping and leverage buy-outs, but now clings to horse- racing and women, calling her from drunken parties in his Park Avenue apartment, urging her to liquidate and take the cash.But then Buchan will just as soon stand this near-caricature on its head and create a new, horrific reality. In the waters off Alaska, the banker from "S L Brimberg" finds himself wrestling a viciously terrified sea otter covered in oil from the "Exxon Bellarmine". Struggling in vain to save it from itself, he for once experiences at first hand the strength and intensity of nature's anger at man's easy despoliation.High Latitudes is a novel which British fiction has long needed - a response to the moribund immorality of the last 15 years and a genuine attempt to "bridge the chasm between commerce and literature in our country".Buchan understands money and the cold efficiency of its dictates.

But he also cares enough to expose its reality, the poverty it creates in the social fabric, in the environment and in the soul.! Julie Myerson's new novel, 'The Touch', will be published by Picador on 26 April.. JANE GARDAM gets away with writing about the middle classes She does so through a combination of veracity and wit. She is a principled tease in a tradition whose obvious presiding genius is Jane Austen, though her books have a choppiness of style both within and between themselves that is absolutely unAustenlike. Something of this tough yet entertaining author's secret must be in her roots.

She was born in North Yorkshire and the jacket copy of this novel tells us that she "maintains her links with the north of England". To tell us about it risks an appearance of touristic southernness; the place must matter very greatly to her since it induces this most discreet - with herself - author to run such a risk. In Faith Fox, Gardam has used the friction between south and north to great effect. This friction, and the alchemical transformations effected by love and death, are the larger themes of a book whose surface is all conversation, comedy.Faith Fox is the book's heroine in that she unites its protagonists and catalyses its action. Yet she never speaks, restricting herself to a couple of hugely rewarding smiles. She is a new-born baby, the daughter of Holly Fox, all-round brick and general Betjeman girl, who has died in childbirth. Holly is the absent heroine of the book, a presence in death, and a type both susceptible to satire and undeniably decent, in a peculiarly Southern English way. It is Holly's adoring mother, Thomasina, whom we come to know best, until we realise that we can unfold from her vivid presence some notion of what her daughter's character might have been, what her granddaughter's may be.No matter how much we learn of Faith's antecedents and environment, we can never be confident of what will happen to her.

The trickiness of events is reflected by the constantly shifting scenes, from amiable northern geriatric chaos to grisly southern residences called such things as "Spindleberries" and furnished with G&T on tap, from an ashram up on the moors to a society wedding, from preparatory school to chippy. When an author is attempting such a panorama, questions about the state of England, which the contemporary novel is held by some frivolously to ignore, can't be far off. What helps any work with such a preoccupation is of course the delineation either of character or of types writ so large as to be epitomes. In his excellent What A Carve Up!, that also contrasted south and north, Jonathan Coe combined the two with real daring and confidence.Jane Gardam has taken the more intimate path, giving herself time to set out, wind up and listen to the many characters who carry the book forward from death to birth and rebirth and death again between them. The effect of this is to induce something in the reader that is unusual in a contemporary novel; we feel fondness for almost every character in the book, even, by the end, the mildly monstrous Holly, with her social certainty and limited imagination. She operates as an enjoyably theatrical dea ex-machina at the end of the narrative, and we are prepared to forgive her outmoded attitudes and glowing smugness, which has anyway been rather fun for us since we can look down upon it.Time and again, Jane Gardam sets up what looks like one thing and shows us the many ways of looking at it. With a shake of her plain sentences, a flourish of the direct speech at which she is so adept across idioms, she shifts our view.

We see chic, brittle Thomasina at a health farm awaiting the birth of her granddaughter; when we see her again she's a broken old lady leaving the health farm following the death of her daughter. But not before she has been spotted by the debonair widower Giles, who woos and wins her in a sandstorm in Egypt, some pages on. They conduct an affair of the most elegant passion in which their advanced age is positively an asset. Assumptions must be laid aside; in this way, Jane Gardam secures tolerance, which is a crucial law in the world of her fiction.We meet Holly's stick of a widower, Andrew, a surgeon who performs tidy hysterectomies.