It was Gerard Woodward who gave me my current yardstick for judging a book: how well-named are the animals and pubs? In the case of August, the first part of Woodward's trilogy - of which this is the conclusion - we have Scipio the cat, The Goat and Compasses and Jack Straw's Castle.

There's an almost immediate difference in the trajectory of this third installment. For the most part, it avoids the 'salty howling' of its precursor, the Booker-shortlisted I'll Go to Bed at Noon, although tragedy seems to creep up on Aldous, a widower attempting to reinvest his life with purpose. Despite his visits to his son in Ostend, Flemish nightclasses, resuming painting and attempting to open a gallery, it is his children to whom fecundity and invention come almost effortlessly - whether in the form of pregnancy or appearances in explicit works of arts - while his projects are hindered by the frailty of his body.

An epigraph suggests that this is the Comedia of the trilogy, and Aldous seems bemused and baffled by his life as an elderly widower. A blind spot exists between how he views his behaviour and how others view him - something Woodward depicts brilliantly from Aldous's viewpoint as he turns up drunk at a school for the blind and stretches out on the floor.

'You just don't understand', says Maria, a woman he meets at a Flemish night-class whom he attempts to woo, and he doesn't quite. His drunken encounter with a young black artist in Ostende concludes in a fog of memory-loss.

If, with 'the house ... silenced' there seems less drama in this novel, Woodward's almost autistic fascination with houses and their workings is present as ever: builders come and go and their actions are detailed precisely. Aldous stares fascinated at the shoots of a potato leaving a drawer.

Also here, thrillingly and sparingly, are leaps into an alternate conciousness preceding or following Aldous suffering 'a fall'. Woodward employs the kind of meta-reality at the conclusion of of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ or throughout Six Feet Under. In I'll Go to Bed at Noon, the middle volume, an alcoholic describes seeing a goldfish in the toilet bowl to a sceptical listener. Here Aldous struggles to convey the depth of his feelings, and pain, to those around him.

For the most part, we are in the comic realm of (a kinder-hearted version of) Kingsley Amis's The Old Fools (Woodward also references Larkin's poem). Where the novel comes undone a little, is in its apparent gathering of every reference to elderly people in literature and film to build its plot. Hence, in the least convincing plot development, Aldous's son marries a woman from a rainforest, an improbability which seems to echo Warren Schmidt's letters to a Tanzanian orphan in About Schmidt.

This book, beautifully observed in places - with its wonderful perspectives - seems a little like an afterthought after the first two novels. Yet, this is precisely the predicament Aldous is struggling to deal with. A book about absence and living after all your friends are gone.