Michael Bracewell — art critic and biographer of Roxy Music — published his previous novel, Perfect Tense, 22 years ago. Unfinished Business is, his publisher says, his “return to the form”. It is not his return to form, because his writing in other literary areas has been consistently compelling for the past two decades, up to and including Souvenir (2021), his non-fiction elegy for the London of the late 1970s and early 1980s, its music, art, fashion and considerably cheaper rents. Like Souvenir, Unfinished Business is concerned with the effects of time and the way London and its people have changed in the past half-century.

Perfect Tense tells the story of an anonymous office worker who breaks with his tedious routine on a tumultuous day. At its outset, Unfinished Business feels like more of the same, when we are introduced to Martin Knight, a fiftysomething whose black suit and “nondescript tie pronounced him a lifer in the service of office work”. Martin is “friendless” and feels “invisible” in a world that is no longer interested in him, as he walks through east London on his way to his City job.

In this description, Martin sounds like a dour everyman, but it turns out he is actually an “aesthete” with cherished memories of his youth in the 1970s and 1980s, and a passion for grand ceilings and fine wine. Martin does not lack self-awareness and, at lunch with his old friend Hannah, observes that “my conversation is comprised solely of reminisces. Every fifty paces I stop to look for something that’s gone. Some shitty pub where I once saw The Damned. That kind of thing.”

Hannah points out that Martin’s daughter Chloe, who is in her mid-twenties, said “that when you talk about punk you sound like your mother talking about the war”. Bracewell’s short novel captures the simplest truth: everyone gets old and yet often it comes as a surprise.

Martin moves in a rarefied milieu. He grew up in Surrey but his ex-wife Marilyn belongs to the “wealthy metropolitan cultural aristocracy”, the daughter of a celebrated Marxist film-maker from Primrose Hill. Chloe lives in an inherited house in Putney and works two days a week. For all that Bracewell’s characters are privileged, however, Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes — ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality — and celebrates beauty.

Bracewell relishes describing furniture, architecture, art and especially clothes. He paints every character’s outfit vividly: “A heavy black Italian skirt of meticulously textured wool that came to just below her knee; aubergine stockings and frankly wild heels in black veau velour and tonal fishnet that reeked of excessive expense.” Elsewhere, he is like a street photographer, finding time before the decisive moment to clock that a waitress’s “dyed blonde hair was pulled off her face with a broad black elastic hairband, to hang to one side in a sultry fright-wig style”.

Though seemingly trivial, these details accumulate to convey not only the characters’ take on the world, but also a portrait of the times they — we — live in. As in Souvenir, Bracewell is coming from a similar place to the poet Philip Larkin, who said that “at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.” Larkin would not have enjoyed Bracewell’s unapologetic metropolitanism but, at a moment when Brexit and Covid have robbed London of some of its swagger, it is refreshing to read a novel that appreciates that, for all its flaws, the capital is still an enormous concentration of cultural energy, style and human potential.

Though there is a tragic denouement, the book’s emotional impact has been sealed already in its evocation of the way the years can unpick even the strongest bonds. The ending is redemptive and leaves open the possibility we might meet Martin again. Either way, I hope we won’t have to wait another 20 years for Bracewell’s next novel.

Unfinished Business by Michael Bracewell, White Rabbit £16.99, 192 pages

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