There's something about Britain just now. Why are so many writers looking at it through the lens of fantasy - either in children's literature or science fiction? Could it be that we can only bear to look at the reality of what New Labour has brought about through the dystopian vision set down by Orwell in 1984? Hot on the heels of Kazuo Ishiguro's strange fable about clones comes Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom. Here, the eight-year-old hero has been forcibly separated from his parents because of a ''rearrangement'' of Britain according to the Hippocratic concept of the four humours.

 

The choleric are assigned to the Yellow Quarter, the Melancholic the Green, the Empathetic the Blue and the Phlegmatic (or most desirable) the Red. Each Quarter of Britain is guarded by supposedly impenetrable concrete walls, and armed guards. Each Quarter has its own flag and animal, and those who show signs of inclining to one humour get relocated, with most of the elderly being sent to the melancholy Greens. Our narrator, Thomas, a robust and cheery lad, goes to live in the Red Quarter with a heartbroken ''father'' and a pretty older ''sister'', Marie, with whom he falls in love. Told to spy on his new family, he lies to protect them but forgets his true family. He is a clever boy and gets recruited by the Government as one of their employees - a job that not only allows his ''family'' exemption from further testing but allows him to travel to the mysterious Blue Quarter. In this strange, watery place he ventures into a club called The Bathysphere and experiences a vivid hallucination or memory of his old, true family. Has he been drugged by the five pin-pricks on his palm, or is he haunted?

 

At any rate, the experience proves addictive, and when a bomb is let off by insurgents in his hotel, Thomas takes the opportunity to go on the run with a few high-denomination banknotes stitched into his collar. Mugged, captured, shipwrecked, betrayed and unexpectedly helped, Thomas gradually comes to realise that ''the authorities had deprived me of a life that was mine, and mine alone. They hadn't asked my permission or given me a choice. They'd just taken it. By force….Twenty-seven years! That was how long it take sometimes. To make the connections, to determine what you feel.''

 

Thomson is probably the best writer of my generation, whose reputation as a cult author has been slowly growing and whose work is consistently fascinating even when its thrillerish plots can't quite be sustained by his extraordinarily beautiful minimalist style. Each of his six previous books is as different and original as this one, but what they share is a preoccupation with the tricks played on the mind, and with loners seeking stability through love and crime. Divided Kingdom is in one sense less nightmarish than Soft (in which characters has their minds controlled through viral advertising), and more overtly political than either Air and Fire or The Book of Revelation. In a sense, it is 1984 revisited, through the eyes of Winston's son - brainwashed yet innocent, until life teaches him to question and challenge what he was taught in the orphanage. The political satire is horribly convincing, especially in the early sections of the novel when describing the increasingly polarised and tribalised world we live in.

 

''How could people with little or nothing be expected to live together? How could they achieve stability, let alone happiness? In short, the family could be held responsible for society's disintegration, and the politicians who masterminded the Rearrangements had felt compelled to acknowledge the fact…The new family would be a group of people who shared a psychological affinity - people who got on, in other words.''

 

As Ferdinand Mount pointed out in The Subversive Family, all dictatorships begin with the attempted eradication of the family which is the one true source of individual resistance to tyranny. Yet Divided Kingdom is also a novel about examining the nature of  individual feeling.

 

''Happiness had a slippery, almost diaphanous quality. It gave nothing off, left nothing behind. Grief was different, though. Grief could be collected, exhibited. Grief could be remembered. And if we had proof that we'd been sad, she argued, then we also had proof that we'd been happy, since the one, more often than not, presupposed the other.'' One may question every step of this conclusion but it is still a mark of Thomson's boldness that he dares to write about happiness - a subject which has become the new taboo and which Ian McEwen's new novel, Saturday, explores with less subtlety and inventiveness.

 

Divided Kingdom fails by a whisker to be a great novel, possibly because Thomson can't resist, once again, in engaging his hero in the supernatural. If he could ditch the magic realism he would gain the audience he deserves. Yet for all that, this is a novel both wonderful and full of wonders, whose haunting perception of events both real and imagined compose a uniquely disturbing tale for our time.