Bohemian rhapsodies

Sarah has had vague shots at an acting career. Now that she's pregnant by an absconding boyfriend, she gives up dreams of the theatre in favour of modelling for her painter father, who tells her tales while she poses for him, of the grand German estate called Gaglow which his family once owned but which was seized from them before the war. Sarah hears his stories about his grandmother and her two sisters, and her grand- uncle Emanuel; she gives birth to her baby, learns to become a single parent, and finally visits Gaglow, which has been returned to the rightful heirs and which offers her now the glimpse of a hope-filled future.

Family sagas can teeter between the dangers of nostalgia and sentimentality on the one hand and too much highly-researched period detail on the other. Esther Freud's novel leaps triumphantly over these difficulties by virtue of its craft. It's fresh, witty, ironic and touching. It mocks even as it plays with our conventional expectations of what young women are like and what families are like. If you think, as do some of our noisiest literary commentators, that novels should deal with the great political issues of the day seen from a male standpoint, then this is not the novel for you. Ditto if your novelistic requirements include serial killers, porn, sexual victims, 1980s corruption and egotism. If you're willing to accept a feminine and subversive take on life, however, and if you see war as inextricably linked to the fate of women surviving at home in honourable and dishonourable ways, if you like writing about sex and friendship that's funny and sweet, if you think it's OK to write about the ambivalent joys of motherhood without being ashamed or apologetic of its sensualities, then this is a book you will enjoy.

The novel swings deftly between past and present, between life in the great house in Germany before the Great War, and life in the bohemian middle class in the present. Reading, you become a sort of tourist, delightedly snooping on how these others live, watching the opulent lunch parties on the lawns, the whippets wrapped in shawls, the cigar-smoking mothers, set against the modern heroine's baby-massage classes and swimming in the women's open-air pool in Hampstead.

Separated by so much time and such political upheavals, the women of the two narratives are united by the confidence deriving from their backgrounds. Eva, dreamily in love with her soldier brother Emanuel, finds the strength, through an initially reluctant identification with her mother, Marianna, to cope with the poverty and hunger of wartime. Sarah, the single mother, teams up with her best friend Pam, happily confiding to us how much she loves her. Fancied and yearned for as they are, the men come and go a little to one side. Men are fallen in love with, the novel suggests, whereas women are relied upon. At the same time, Sarah ruefully accepts how she's tugged in two directions, wanting Pam to herself yet having to acknowledge the claims of Pam's boyfriends .

Esther Freud doesn't pretend to have solved these dilemmas. She describes loving female friendship in touching detail, as she also describes the charms of motherhood and the lures of chaps who make you love too much. She paints a portrait of feminine survival and pleasure without criticising it. She seems to be hinting that things have moved on just a bit. At least Sarah doesn't get called a slag for having a baby outside marriage, whereas the "wicked" governess at Gaglow is spurned as a seducer-turned-prostitute.

Sarah's greatest tool is her original and honest view of people and things. Her first-person account is studded with sharply appreciative images of daily life. Certainly, the tales of Gaglow life read as though recounted by her, not by her father. That's a potent theme in this entertaining and charming novel: the reclining nude who talks back to the painter, defies his vision of her by combining it with her own, and takes you deep inside herself, into memory, imagination and history.