The Siege by HelenDunmore

Novels do not always attend to the evidence of the senses (how many smells or tastes do you find in Jane Austen or George Eliot?). It took James Joyce's Ulysses to bring fiction alive to ordinary odours and to make readers feel life at the fingers' ends. The realism of the senses is at the heart of Helen Dunmore's The Siege, which imagines the experience of enduring the siege of Leningrad during the second world war.

The Siege is an agonising read, but also a numbing one. The novel, which narrates the first and worst winter of a siege that lasted from 1941 until 1944, animates the senses in order to feel them shutting down. Its early pages are full of intensely observed sensory details, filtered through the consciousness of its central character, 23-year-old Anna Levin. When she visits the dacha of her father's former lover, she notices the "warm, resinous and sleepy" air, "an acrid smell of fox" and, inside the house, its "dry, unopened smell". The character does not know what is coming, but the novelist does, and she prepares you for later privations with a page describing eating two fresh trout, with their "salty, delicate crust of scales".

Tasting things is enough in itself. "Sharp, smoky taste of anchovies, potatoes rich and savoury with anchovy oil". Eventually, taste and smell will return, only cruelly. Leningrad's main food warehouse is bombed by the Germans and the acrid smell of burning sugar fills the air. Afterwards soot and food-grease coat the city's window ledges. "If you lift a hank of your own hair you can smell the stink of burnt fat".

Numbness comes with the months of cold and hunger and takes possession of the narrative. It is a kind of insensate blankness in the minds of the novel's characters. After early waves of hopeful or terrified rumour, people become oblivious to any larger narrative of the war. Only three short chapters told from the point of view of Pavlov, in charge of the city's civil administration through the siege, give us any proper perspective on the unfolding of history. As winter takes its grip, "Slowly, the city sinks down, like a great ship sinking in an ice-field", and the characters themselves seem buried under the thickening snow, with all sense of time, beyond the difference between night and day, lost to them. They are limited to their bodies, to their senses, and these too begin to shut down.

The novel's first paragraph, describing the glow of a long June evening before the German invasion, alights on vividly green lime leaves. "When you touch them, they are fresh and tender. It's like touching a baby's skin." You remember the simile later on, as characters notice the different hues that skin takes as hunger and cold grip a human body. The "blue-tinged face" of one woman desperately bartering for food proclaims her "a goner". In a food queue the woman ahead of Anna is clad in a heavy fox-fur hat and coat, the accoutrements of affluence; but when she turns, "her face is the colour of old candle-grease". "Everything makes you blink, and look twice." The novel is minutely attentive to flesh, Anna anxiously inspecting the still living body of her little brother – the thickening hairs on his arms and legs, the skin "yellowish, tight over prominent bones of his forehead and nose". You look with Anna and her lover Andrei at her sick father and notice a "thread of pulse" that unexpectedly "jumps in his wrist", but see too how his skin is "darkening, growing dusky around mouth and nose".

The details, you trust, must be taken from the historical and documentary sources listed in a bibliography at the end of the novel. But the dismantling of a child's papier-mâché castle to extract the paste that they might eat is enacted with painful precision. Flesh is the final reality. Anna dreams of fat women at a steam bath, snorting with contentment, "their heads small above mountains of breast, belly, buttock and thigh". Hunger and cold bring a hallucinatory quality to perceptions, a sudden and impossible snatch of the scent of coffee from a ventilation shaft as the senses flicker.

When taste is reactivated, it is a kind of ecstasy. They get hold of a jar of raspberry jam and the narrative switches into the second person to dramatise the reanimation of the senses. "The jam syrup slides over tongue, palate, throat. You feel suddenly warm . . . You feel your cheeks flushing." This sense is so primary that when, with the coming of summer, Anna and Andrei become lovers once more, we are told that "they tasted each other again". Taste is the final reality.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Helen Dunmore for a discussion on Wednesday 16 February at 7pm, Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1. Tickets are £9.50 online or £11.50 from the box office: 020 7520 1490. www.kingsplace.co.uk

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