I have a dread of public swimming baths  the legacy, I believe, of training in childhood for a bronze survival award, an ordeal that involved inflating one's wet pyjama bottoms (why?) and pointlessly diving for rubber bricks. Needless to say, I never graduated to silver. All of which is a rather long-winded way of saying that A Taste of Chlorine, the new graphic novel by the award-winning French illustrator, Bastien Vivès, might have been written for me. Vivès's hero, a young man whose name we never find out, has a similar loathing of serious swimming. Only when the chiropractor who is treating him for curvature of the spine seems finally to lose patience with him  "If you won't do any sport, there's a limit to what I can do for you"  does he give in and take the plunge.

At first, his weekly sessions go badly. There is a lot of splashing and crashing into other swimmers. But then he starts talking to a girl who really can swim and is willing to give him a few pointers, and he begins to look forward to Wednesdays. The misery of the changing room, and the footbath, and the close proximity of other (often unattractive) bodies fades almost to zero beside the warm anticipation of wondering whether she will be there, and how much time she will be willing to devote to him (she comes with a man who may or may not be her boyfriend). The weeks tick by. The pool, crowded and noisy and inhospitable, becomes a repository of hope, a place of longing and expectancy. Hell, he even invests in a pair of goggles.

Will the two ever meet outside the pool? It be would giving rather too much away to answer this question, though one of the more striking things about A Taste of Chlorine is that almost  emphasis on almost  every scene takes place in the pool; if shades of turquoise and aquamarine are your thing (they are mine), then you will find this book extraordinarily beautiful. Low on dialogue, it's Vivès's remarkable illustrations that draw you on. They capture superbly well not only the movement of human beings through water, but also the peculiar hallucinatory feeling that being in a public swimming pool often induces: the echoes, the strange tricks of light, the wobbly distortions. When our hero swims on his back, Vivès provides a few frames that reveal nothing more than the glass roof of the pool. When he swims underwater, we sense the pressure on his lungs through the smallest adjustments to his puckered mouth and bulging cheeks. When he is resting at the edge of the pool but feeling the cold, we see only his head and the very tops of his shoulders (because the water is warm, relatively speaking). It's like watching an extremely watery silent movie: evocative, dream-like, mysterious. Never before has the monotony of swimming lengths seemed so appealing.