'A Possible Life' is passably well done

Sebastian Faulks is best known as the author of two books, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, which belong in a loose class with Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres and Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier – war novels of sweep, power and true literary skill, all of which nevertheless bear a slight taint of sensationalism, of sentiment cheaply bought. (In the non-war wing of the clubhouse, you can find Yann Martel and his tiger.)

These writers are less psychologically acute, and less intelligently reticent about the meaning of war, than, for instance, the brilliant war novelist Pat Barker. They're also probably more entertaining.

Faulks's new book, A Possible Life, confirms the precedent of those earlier novels: it is a rueful, pleasurable work, extremely sharp, with true insights into aging and loss, but it is also diminished by its serial stumbles into emotional and narrative cliché.

The author has chosen to call A Possible Life "A Novel in Five Parts," no doubt to the delight of his publishers, who will be intimately and despairingly acquainted with the sales record of most short fiction collections.

In fact the book is not a novel in any practical sense, but a group of five lengthy stories, faintly linked by a graceful spiritualism and a few small totems, from a certain farm in France to a secondary character named (Faulks is English) Cheeseman. This structure is our first hint of triteness – it's exactly what the cool kids, from Jennifer Egan in A Visit from the Goon Squad to David Mitchell in Ghostwritten, have started doing in recent years.

Faulks's five tales concern, in order, a British schoolmaster changed by his service during World War II; a Victorian laborer who marries two different sisters; a scientist in the near future who effectively disproves the possibility of life after death; the spiritual journey of a maid in rural France during the 19th century; and an enigmatic young female singer-songwriter in the 1970s.

With the exception of the third, each of these possible lives is profoundly absorbing and readable, constructed with expert craft, and Faulks's writing is often both beautiful and perceptive. Before leaving for the war, for example, Geoffrey Talbot, the schoolmaster, returns home to eat supper with his parents on a warm evening, and has "the sensation of time stopping, as though all his childhood summers were rolled into that moment," while after the war, "the decade was like a tundra, to be crossed with collar turned up." A Possible Life is rich with moments like these.

But its stories are so pat, both in large and small ways, that, if Faulks weren't very evidently sincere, their aim might almost come to seem deconstructionist. The stock figure of a shellshocked schoolmaster extends at least as far back as To Serve Them All My Days, and it's hard to forgive an author who gropes for a symbol of English serenity and can only come up with cricket.

The small French town in the book's fourth story is full of puffed-up officials. The songwriter of the final story, like an extra from Almost Famous or a thinly disguised homage to Stevie Nicks, is beautiful, troubled, and, surprise, might have some Native American blood.

Still, originality is a precondition only of great literature, not of great popular fiction. A Possible Life strives valiantly to be the first, with varying success; it is indisputably the second.

Charles Finch is the author of A Death in the Small Hours.