Let me state with emphasis: I have not, for a very long time, read a contemporary novel that has given me such immense pleasure as A S Byatt’s Still Life. Although I usually shy away from comparison, this book makes most fiction published today spurious coinage. A quotation from this novel, ‘Good writers should be good readers. Writing is a civilized activity’, locates the roots of this achievement, because as themes interlink and develop, one is increasingly aware of participating in a ‘civilized activity’ (in the same sense in which one reads and rereads ‘classic’ fiction). That A S Byatt is herself ‘a good reader’ is confirmed by the way she pays her readers the compliment of assuming that they will be familiar with the cultural, artistic and philosophical references of her characters.

Still Life, paradoxically titled since it vibrates with a continuity of life, is in fact volume two of a tetralogy. It is not perhaps necessary to read volume one, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), although strongly recommended, since this introduces the main characters of Still Life.

Still Life takes us on, from 1953. More in the nature of a metaphor (and Mrs Byatt is splendid with metaphor) the introductory pages to both novels show a meeting between three characters – Frederica, Alexander and Daniel – at a private view some years later than the main text; one at an Elizabethan exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968, the other at a Post-Impressionism show at the Royal Academy in 1980. With this glimpse into the future the emotional links between the characters are established, the fact that they have not met for some time, that Frederica is still the directing vitality, that Alexander is still elegantly passive and that Daniel again refuses to join them for tea at Fortnum & Masons.

We have met most of the others in The Virgin in the Garden. It is always difficult to paraphrase, especially when the characters are in a continuous state of development and adjustment. Adjustment in particular is what Ms Byatt observes and illustrates: adjustment to changing social circumstances, intellectual commitments, family loyalties and divisions, passionate and casual sex, fulfilled and unrequited love, and time passing with birth and death.

At the root of this large cast is the professional middle class Potter family. Bill is the father atheist, radical schoolmaster, intolerant and frustrated. Sensual Stephanie marries the working-class curate Daniel who believes in God rather than the church. Frederica, the pivot character, dramatic, impressionable, promiscuous, intellectually precocious, falls in love with Alexander, an older man, whose first play about Elizabeth is a link to the introduction in The Virgin in the Garden. In Still Life he is writing a play about Van Gogh. His response to Frederica is not entirely that of unrequited love; it is unconsummated through a series of sad ironic mishaps. In Still Life, while still retaining her feeling for Alexander, Frederica falls in love with another Ivory Tower donnish poet-philosopher; again frustration. There is a young Potter brother, Marcus, who is in a state of breakdown due to an unfortunate experience with his science master in The Virgin in the Garden; in Still Life Marcus finds his own stability as a botanist. These are guidelines to wonderfully detailed portraits.

Frederica’s Cambridge years in the Fifties are marvellously pitched. She could be said to represent the ‘free’ woman of the period, with her tumbling in and out of bed with the Cambridge youth.

‘I had the idea that this novel could be written innocently, without recourse to reference to other people’s thoughts, without, as far as possible, recourse to simile or metaphor. This turned out to be impossible: one cannot think at all without a recognition and realignment of ways of thinking and seeing we have learned over time’.

From time to time, Byatt informs us of her purpose. She takes us into the thoughts of her characters, quotes from their notebooks and from the letters of Van Gogh. An intimacy is created. These people are rounded, are perpetually occupied with thinking about what they do or might do next. Domestically we have all their detail and drama. The drama of Stephanie’s accidental death is chilling.

Memory and learning, and the greed for both which is application and dedication, inspire Still Life. At the end the characters are still in a state of quest. They are in fact the survivors, and though bruised, they clearly have the will to continue and to accept whatever may next happen to them. Last month I suggested that Anthony Burgess’s The Kingdom of the Wicked would be a sure contender for the Booker Prize. This month I place my head on the block and state that Still Life will be the winner. It is absolutely magnificent, a marvel, a delight, a rare fiction.