There is not going gently into that good night, and then there is teetering into it on spiked-heel boots while strapped into a leather corset in search of clandestine kicks among like-minded fetishists. If it sounds an exhausting and chilly way to spend an evening, well, it is. At least, that’s how it feels to Sam Quaid, the middle-aged playwright who is beset by misgivings – he himself is dressed in ‘the more chicken-hearted guise of a fallen Quaker who had never seen the sun’ – but gamely determined to accompany his lover, Lily.

Where is Sam’s obeisance going to lead him, or Lily? Here is where the novel becomes truly shocking

In fact she’s not entirely convinced either, but, with an ‘icy, fateful mutuality’ leading them on, they are committed to pleasing one another. This is how it goes when your union is founded on transgression – he has a suspicious wife at home, she has a placid, long-suffering partner – and you feel obscurely obliged to misbehave. They are rather happier, it transpires, when they enact their fantasies, which are heavily influenced by Sam’s need for punishment, in a series of discreet hotels, and perhaps even happier when they are simply talking to one another.

There are few writers more attuned to the umbilical cord between sex and shame than Howard Jacobson, and perhaps none prepared to explore with such commitment the concurrent seriousness and ridiculousness that desire provokes. The agonies he puts his characters through are exquisite, but they are nonetheless agonies, and they have the longest of taproots. When Sam meets Lily for the first time, both suffering a coup de foudre, he is instantly taken back to the female English teacher (big red lips, painted nails) who took him to task for admiring Andrew Marvell. (‘Is that all a woman is to you, Quaid, two breasts and the rest?’) This is before we get to his father, a self-styled philosopher of free love with a hatred of marriage and little regard for his son; or indeed Lily’s father, a philanderer whose absence from her life is slightly less destructive.

Lily and Sam meet when she engages him to present a documentary about writers in exile – they opt for Lawrence in Taos rather than Joyce in Trieste or Ibsen in Sorrento – and immediately embark on an affair which, for its first few years, must combat Sam’s obsessively nurtured outbreaks of guilt. He is prone to using words like ‘tergiversation’ to describe his thought processes, which must wear thin. Lily, practical and tough-minded professionally, adopts the role of smoother and reassurer, determinedly self-possessed even as she doubts his commitment: ‘You have to honour another person’s sense of decorum, even if you think it’s claptrap,’ she reflects. He, meanwhile, irritates his wife, alienates his stepdaughters and moons around London parks thinking about Lily’s dressing-gowns and worrying.

All this is comical, as it is meant to be, Jacobson’s tone by turns flippant and maudlin, grandiose and elegiac. The couple’s relatively fleeting flirtation with the world of sado-masochism is delivered in a series of cringingly funny set pieces in ‘deep, dark, iniquitous cellars’ from Amsterdam to Slough, and comes to an abrupt end when Lily scares herself by going too far with a man in a Hermès scarf. But what lies beneath is a graver attempt to get to Sam’s veneration of Lily, which relies on him being demeaned in precisely the right way; paradoxically, he notes, he feels more of a man the more he submits to her will, ‘as puppet and magician’s pretty assistant’.

Where is Sam’s seemingly bottomless obeisance going to lead him, or Lily, or, for that matter, us? Here is where the novel becomes truly shocking. It leads to happiness. It leads to Kew – possibly, Sam thinks, ‘the only suburb of London without a bondage club’, although Jacobson might get letters putting him straight – and to views of the sky, untainted air, a once unimaginable future that has come to pass. If jigsaws have taken the place of marathon sex sessions, so be it; there are compensations. Is Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’, from which the novel takes its title, wrong to suggest that our ‘almost-instinct’ that love will survive us is only ‘almost true’? That poem might leave us thinking, contra persistent snatch-quoting, that fidelity is a sentimental ambition imposed on Larkin’s stone couple by onlookers, something that we would wish to be true as a means of facing down death and disintegration.

Jacobson’s version isn’t so sure. Age does come for Lily and Sam, and although their ailments are explicitly detailed, the overall tone itself veers towards the fabular, its point of view gradually distancing itself from them. ‘Happy endings,’ intones the unseen narrator, ‘should neither be begrudged nor scattered like confetti.’ It’s not entirely clear which kind of conclusion, if any, he has in mind, or whether the novel’s title should more properly end with a question mark. But when the fine and private place of the grave beckons, are any endings happy?