Wish You Were Here finds the language of true compassion

Novelists, being on the whole brainy people, like to write about brainy people, or make their characters better with words than they would be in real life. The classic modern, or near-modern, example of this is the hyper-articulate John Self in Martin Amis's Money, with a vocabulary that is comically wider than one would reasonably expect from such an oaf.

Graham Swift, Amis's exact contemporary, takes the exactly opposite approach. And in his latest novel you can't help but notice how everyone in it wrestles with language, and tends to lose. Even the simplest words defeat them: "'born' wasn't quite the word for it". "Though 'head', back then, had not been such a good word to call to mind."

Asked if he is going to "mope around here all winter", a character silently corrects the speaker: "the word was 'mourn', he'd thought".

But as Swift's novels so brilliantly prove, just because someone doesn't have a way with words doesn't mean they can't experience deep emotion, or be powerfully moved by the forces of history and time.

The novel begins with Jack Luxton, a retired farmer, the last of his family, sitting by the window of the cottage overlooking the caravan park he now runs. It is the off season, and there is a loaded shotgun lying on the bed behind him. And the whole novel is going to tell us how it got there.

I doubt there is a better novelist than Swift for this kind of story. He cannot create a family without giving them an attic-full of cupboards packed with skeletons. In Jack Luxton's case we have, mainly, a suicide, the legacy of BSE and foot and mouth, and the death of his younger brother in Iraq. Not so much in the grand scheme of things but enough to create an atmosphere of devastation. And if Swift doesn't let his characters use fancy words - as farmers in North Devon, one could hardly expect them to - that doesn't mean they are not in the grip of huge emotions.

And he depicts them with devastating tact. On being one of the people shouldering his brother's coffin to the grave: "It wasn't difficult, as a physical task, it wasn't so difficult." Which so subtly hints at the other ways in which it is, in fact, incredibly difficult. (Later on, a similar simplicity of repetition: "He'd borne Tom's coffin and he couldn't bear any more.")

The great thing about Swift, then, is the way he takes the elements of melodrama but uses them in a calm, unostentatious and utterly plausible way. In doing so - and the meandering way his novels unfold, the carefully managed emergence of significant details, helps in this enormously - he gets to the heart of people.

Serious rural novels such as this one remind us of Thomas Hardy. But Hardy seemed to relish his characters' suffering. Swift might make his endure, or fail to endure, the most awful things - but in the end, the very end of this extraordinary novel, thank goodness, he treats them with compassion.