The Chase by Candida Clark

Where's the ammo? I want to blow this lot away

Setting a dark and sinister novel against the backdrop of the recent foxhunting ban may have seemed a brilliant idea when supporters and opponents of the bill were at each others throats. But BBC research shows that foxhunting in England has been "almost completely unaffected" by the legislation, so Candida Clark finds herself in the position of having tied her colours to a plot with the emotional and psychological drama of a trip to Tesco.

It was always a risky strategy, even when hunt supporters were threatening civil disobedience on a monumental scale. The ban on hunting with hounds is too recent to have been elevated to the realms of "history", but too long ago to feel dynamic. Apart from those who actually go hunting, the rest of us have forgotten what all the fuss was about.

This is Candida Clark's sixth novel and once again she has opted for the literary convention of the country house weekend. It's an idea which is as tired as faded chintz loose covers. Even though Clark is a gifted writer, she's attempting the literary equivalent of constructing a gothic mansion out of MDF and a pot of wallpaper paste.

The Chase takes place in February 2005, just as hunting flips from being an age-old tradition to an illegal activity. In Wiltshire Sir Leo Domeyne and his beautiful wife Celia invite a group of friends and family to dinner in preparation for the next day's first defiant post-ban hunt. Improbably, Celia's drunken sister brings a Kurdish poet, which allows Candida Clark to make slightly forced connections between the gassing of the Kurds by Saddam Hussein and the gassing of foxes. Another guest, a former soldier who left the army after being shot in the shoulder, is characterised as a weak and damaged hound. A terrier-man called Cutter is painted as the fox himself: devious, criminal, violent and unpredictable. These anthropomorphic creatures assembled in the dining room and lurking in the woods harbour an assortment of jealousies, obsessions and sexual secrets. But the trouble is we don't care very much. Sullen men emerge from gun rooms, they finger bullets obsessively, sling shotguns over their arms and think about murder. There's enough ammunition around to blast the lot of them as far as the south coast, but the tension is as tight as baggy elastic. When one character finally dies, it comes as a blessed relief. It means we can canter towards the last page and home.

It's a novel which is curiously misogynist in tone, so that Celia's failure to give birth to a boy means that "the line broke off, weak with daughters and cousins." Grown men don't even know how to wipe stains off their clothes. "He spilt a drop of yellow curry ... on his white shirt and cursed. She knew how to get rid of such stains. He did not." Characters, even young ones, say things like "Good Lord, man, pull yourself together," or "Isn't Anscombe about to fall off his twig?" and "It's your neck of the woods, you give it a pop."

The really frustrating thing about The Chase is that Candida Clark is capable of writing brilliantly. But that's not enough. She needs to be able to tell a story too. Her novel combines characters that Jilly Cooper would have worked magic with and a plotline which aspires to Ian Rankin. In Candida Clark's hands the two go together like Victoria sponge and engine oil.