Occasionally you read a novel that is so good you find yourself wanting to say 'thank you' to the author. Life, End Of is one of those books. Christine Brooke-Rose breaks many taboos in terms of what subjects are generally considered acceptable to write about and is invigoratingly skilled at playing around with style and form. This is in part because she is not afraid to show her intelligence as a writer. She never falls into the trap of writing down to us.

Central to this experimental novel is the experience of old age. The key character's body is breaking up, losing the sophisticated co-ordination that is the everyday working of body parts. She writes refreshingly blunt detail, documenting the trial of tiny tasks becoming mountainous in scale. It's the kind of agonising read that is truly therapeutic, bringing to the surface aspects of out lives that are on deemed impolite to discuss.

The dying lead character has an ambiguous relationship to the author: Christine Brooke-Rose makes clear to readers that this is her last novel. There is little of the first person - the narrator's 'I' - here. Brooke-Rose wants us to create the character through ourselves, the text and our knowledge of her. As well as foregrounding the rules of literary theory (all the better to play with them) it veers into experiments with typography and wordplay. My favourite was 'zimming', her word for whizzing about on a zimmer frame.

Life, End Of 'zigzags like blood pressure, changing registers, personal one moment, metaphysical the next, philosophical, catty, humorous, technical, frivolous, rhetorical, witty, political, historical, personal again.' It is ambitious in the most generous sense: the sense of being enthusiastically engaged with the world. For, as the novel says, 'Enthusiasm is life.' Even when your eyes ands legs don't work any more. And when enthusiasm goes, the reader and writer leave the room, too.