The Forgotten Waltz is inconclusive and ragged but then so is life

Adultery may have lost much of its literary frisson nowadays, what with divorce being commonplace and homebreaking affairs hardly ever resulting in social ostracism, let alone murder and suicide. Look at Charles and Camilla. But extra-marital liaisons do have consequences, and they're the stuff of Anne Enright's novel, The Forgotten Waltz, though the pleasures of extra-marital sex get a pretty good showing too.

Before you even ask, let me say that although this is a novel mostly about adultery, there's hardly any explicit sex. The author describes the liaisons without any actual body parts; she had fun, apparently, putting them in and taking them out. So, no filth.

This being Anne Enright, the real pleasure of the book is the dancing, delicious prose; contemporary Irish speech and cadences captured and put on the page. There's an arresting turn of phrase, a figure of speech you never normally see in print, on every page.

She has formidable powers of observation, allowing the reader to recognise the realities of everyday life in throwaway asides. And because this is a first person narrative, written entirely from the perspective of the clever, funny, horny main character - heroine would be pushing it - there is no obvious divide between the perspective of author and character. Much of the straggly, shrewd, intelligent but not always coherent thoughts of Gina, the adulteress, could be Enright's own voice.

The ostensible interest of the book is that it brings a useful focus to bear on the fallout of an affair on the child of the lover, Sean, a curious little girl called Evie, who has problems enough already. Indeed, the prologue to the novel brings Evie into the centre of the story before anyone else: "... the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive. Not that there is anything to forgive, of course, but the fact that a child was mixed up in it all made us feel that there was no going back; that it mattered".

Thus we get an answer to the problem (from the literary point of view) that adultery nowadays is no very big deal: it does matter, if you're the child of the marriage that is being broken by an affair.

But the real interest of this novel, its relevance, is that it is a curiously exact picture of Ireland in the heady, mindless days before the Irish crash, and in the immediate aftermath. The fixation with property prices alone, rising (Gina and her husband sit on the floor of their new home, pretending to listen to its price going up " ... by seventy-five euros a day") and then falling, mark this out as a novel painfully of its time.

This isn't a neat narrative; it's inconclusive and ragged. But then, so too is life.