Graham Swift has chosen a line from William Blake to serve as the motto for his new novel, Wish You Were Here, but he might just as well have picked the famous opening of Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth": "What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?" Dead cows and dead soldiers feature heavily in the book and there's even a suggestion of those little country pieties, the flowers and the "drawing-down of blinds", by which they are both remembered. Swift has a good eye for the way large stories and small ones intersect and here he has managed to turn a novel about a brief marital spat into a reflection on Englishness and its decline.

Mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease and the effects on the countryside of second homes play their part, along with the attack on the World Trade Centre, the vague war on terror and the two rather less vague wars that it precipitated, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The immediate story covers just a few days and frames, like his Booker-winning novel Last Orders, a journey to a funeral (of sorts); but the novel spends as much time in the past as in the present.

The Luxton boys are the last descendants of an old farming family in north Devon. Farming and patriotism run in the blood, and when Tom, the younger son, turns 18, he runs away from unhappiness at home to join the army, leaving Jack to look after their father and the farm. Ellie Merrick, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer and Jack's semi-secret girlfriend, persuades him to turn the eventual death of both their fathers into a chance to get out and buy into a caravan site on the Isle of Wight. But when Tom dies in Iraq, Jack decides to have him buried in the old churchyard, where his family have always been buried, and the funeral forces him to confront again where he came from and what he left behind.

It's a wonderfully natural premise for a quiet, realist novel about the changing face of England, but Swift isn't quite a realist. There's a rhythm to the prose which is unmistakable and reminds us again and again of the author's themes (and his own insistence on them). The plot travels in waves rather than lines and phrases, images and ideas are artfully spaced and repeated like musical motifs. There are some terrific setpieces, too, such as the repatriation ceremony for Tom; and the pressure on Jack, and the reader, is carefully controlled and increased until the final and deliberate release of the anticlimax.

Swift is clearly a writer who knows what he wants to do and has figured out a way of doing it. Pinter seems an obvious influence here and Pinter's gift for inarticulateness; but Pinter uses everyday language to suggest something strangely poetic and threatening and that's not exactly what Swift is doing. The title of the novel comes from a couple of postcards Jack sends to Ellie, from the family holiday in Brigwell Bay he takes with his mother and brother on successive summers. These are, we learn, the first postcards "Jack had ever written. And the first of the two would have been a serious struggle for him, if his mother hadn't helped him and, after a little thought, suggested he write, 'Wish you were here.' And he had. He hadn't known it was the most uninventive of messages. He'd written it. And he'd wished it."

Those holidays with his mother and brother remain "the best times of his life", even though the happiness he felt made him miss Ellie all the more. And the fact that he can express this conflicted sentiment only in the banal phrases of a seaside postcard (wish you were here) doesn't make it any less real. The uncomfortably close relationship between the truth and the cliches by which we approach it is one of Swift's subjects in this novel. Tom runs away on the morning of his 18th birthday and Jack remembers to buy him a card. He gives him the card and makes his goodbye at the same time  they will never see each other again. Still, he can't think of anything better or more intimate to say than: "'Good luck, Tom. I'll be thinking of you.' Which was a foolish thing perhaps to have said, because it was exactly what he'd written on the card."

Though the novel bears a strong formal and thematic resemblance to Last Orders, the point Swift makes here is really very different. The similarities are obvious. Like Last Orders, Wish You Were Here centres on a series of funeral arrangements. Like Last Orders, it describes the decline of a kind of heart-of-oak, lower-middle-class Englishness, though Swift moves the action from city to country, and the betrayal, of father by son, involves not only the rejection of a profession (butcher in one case, farmer in the other) but a patch of land.

The differences are subtler. Part of the charm of Last Orders is that it captured the colourful and original banter of a certain class of people, which sustained and comforted them even in the face of their decline. There is very little banter in Wish You Were Here. There is much less talk generally and what there is suggests mostly the sadness of the "honest cliche". The new book is not only grimmer but less funny, and a little less vivid, too.

All of which is a part of Swift's point, but what seems less successful is the plot he constructs to bring it home. The marital spat that frames the story looks more like a device than a fight. And the character of Jack may be too relentlessly limited. Last Orders was told from a series of first-person perspectives because everyone involved had the gift of the gab. But Swift can't let Jack tell his own story  he can hardly write a picture postcard. The result is a kind of intrusive, almost bullying third-person narration. When his brother tells Jack that he's about to run off and join the army, Jack says: "OK, Tom. You can rely on me. Your secret's safe with me." But it's Swift who adds, with what might be a little frustration: "'And with the cows,' he might have said, if he'd had the wit for it."

Benjamin Markovits's Childish Loves will be published by Faber & Faber in August.

The story of a dreadful day of catharsis in the life of a resolutely ordinary man, Graham Swift's ninth novel begins with remembered images of funeral pyres of burning cattle and the collapse of the twin towers. "There is no end to madness," thinks Jack Luxton, sitting alone in his bedroom in a cottage on the Isle of Wight, looking out over the rain-lashed caravan site, now closed for winter, that he has run for the past 10 years with his wife, Ellie. Jack has just returned from the repatriation and funeral of his younger brother Tom, a soldier killed in Iraq, who had left the family many years ago and never kept in touch. Terrible, unrevealed words have passed between Jack and his wife, and she has taken off with the car. Now, with a loaded gun, he awaits her return.

How has this "smiling host in a joke of a shirt", with his "gormless block of a face", come to this? Wish You Were Here is the slow, repetitive unfolding of Jack's life leading up to this point. A probing but leisurely character study masquerading as a mystery, it is scattered awkwardly with irritating and heavy-handed hints of impending doom, auguring a repeat of the damp squib ending of Swift's last novel, Tomorrow.

Fortunately, Wish You Were Here is a far better book. A dark, restrained family drama with its roots in Devon soil, it takes us back to a time when Jack and Ellie were diffident childhood sweethearts growing up on neighbouring farms.

The Luxtons at Jebb Farm  Jack, his parents, Michael and Vera, and brother Tom, eight years his junior  are a tight-knit, inward-looking family, sustained by a proud heritage. A story is told and retold of two Luxton great-uncles who died gloriously in the first world war and whose names are carved on the local war memorial. The land, farmed by Luxtons for nearly 400 years, is sacred: "It meant something if you were born, as he was, on a farm: the name. The generations going back and forwards, like the hills, whichever way you looked, around them. And what else had his mother borne him for than to give him and show him his birthright?"

But now the farm has gone, ruined by "the war with the cow disease". Jack is now "the soft-living proprietor of a caravan site". For three weeks or a month every year, he and Ellie jet off to the Caribbean, but he never really enjoys himself. Even when being towed high up in the air in a parachute behind a motorboat, he "just hung there, Jack Luxton, like some big baby being dandled". And indeed, Jack is infantile. He's 26 when, following the twin blows of his mother's death and mad cow disease, Tom runs off to join the army, leaving him "to Michael's mercy". Ellie is the same age and living with her father. At no time is it ever considered that these two grown adults might leave their parents. They are, as Jack freely admits, "slaves". Even after their fathers' deaths, Jack is equally biddable when Ellie, by this time "all for change", suggests that they sell up and throw in their lot with caravans. She does this when they are sitting up in the Big Bed  "the very bed where his own mother had breathed her last, and consummated her marriage to Michael Luxton, and even once, in the small hours of a September night, given challenging birth to a son called Jack"  after which Ellie goes downstairs "in her bare arse, in Jebb Farmhouse", as Jack recalls, still prim and shocked after all these years.

This is not a book for impatient readers, for the characters scarcely come alive until nearly halfway through, and Ellie never really does. But it's a book which improves with retrospect. Swift circles round themes, characters and events, each circuit revealing a little more, tracking here and there in time, following long hypothetical interludes where we are told in detail what so-and-so might have said if such-and-such had happened, and taking detailed detours into the points of view of decidedly peripheral characters.

This shows the fragility of truth and the complexity of memory but can be irksome, and may actually stand in the way of what is really important.

As the past explodes like a bomb in the midst of a relationship that goes back further than either party can remember, piercing emotions combine with years of buried resentment into a dangerous mix, but I never for one moment believed in the gun. It seemed an unnecessary dramatisation, as distracting as those digressions from the true strength of this book, which is Swift's ability to capture the exquisite poignancy of certain moments: how the memory of a dog's old blanket on a bed, or the wrinkles on his mother's wrist as she pours him a cup of tea, open a world of loss for a block of a man who's never cried, not even in front of his wife.

Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie is published by Canongate.