The Face, by Phil Whitaker

D J Taylor wonders when impressive realism fades into depressing drabness

Though its defining event – the horrific sexual assault of a child – reflects a contemporary anxiety, the heart of Phil Whitaker's edgy third novel seems to reside (along with the assault itself) back in a quarter-century-old past. "The world was different then, half a lifetime away," one of Whitaker's two narrative voices suggests. The sound of distress that now rages from all sides "was there, but we didn't hear". There is an odd, though purposeful, moment in which thirtysomething Zoe, the other narrative voice, returns to her father's house to find her room apparently unchanged since the day she left it: the Liverpool FC coverlet in the bed; George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley grinning from the walls. In the end, The Face is a book about distance travelled.

Ray Arthur, Zoe's dad, is a retired policeman, lately dead in mysterious circumstances having veered off a motorway in his car. Zoe, concerned partner and infant daughter trailing in her wake, is back in her native Nottingham to sort out the effects (copies of Club International sadly cluttering the refuse sacks) and track down a curious revenant from Ray's early life, who left the last extant message on his answering machine. This is Declan Barr, a former police artist superannuated by computers who now makes his living sketching court scenes for the newspapers. He is, Zoe divines, sole witness to a hitherto unexplored side to her father's life.

Thus framed, the narrative proceeds in three parallel lines: transcripts from the inquest (inconclusive); Zoe's tour of Nottingham, complete with flashbacks; and Declan's account of his past life, the squandered career as a "real" artist and a failed relationship that eventually led him towards police work. Before very long, the narrative lines begin to assume a single point of focus: the violation of nine-year-old Mary Scanlon, Arthur and Barr's fitting up of an innocent man while the real culprit – in fact the girl's father – escapes; contemporary chickens coming home to roost.

Though crisply written and full of arresting images, there are several drawbacks to this novel. The first is simply the inevitability of dad's involvement in the bygone miscarriage of justice: once the hints have been dropped, the exposure is only a matter of time. The second is the drabness of landscape and material: a vista of sleazy Nottingham pubs and cheerless roadside hotels, where everything comes drenched in spiritual cigarette smoke. Nothing wrong with drabness, of course, a principal building-block of the English novel since George Gissing: it is merely that Whitaker does very little with his inert surroundings. Declan's monologues, for instance, are just dreary-portentous and without much menace.

He is much better on a sexually charged incident or two from Zoe's teendom – dad coming across her in the bath and so on – and better still in depicting some of the tensions in Zoe's relationship with Paul and Holly. In an odd way, there is another kind of novel struggling to get out from beneath The Face, one about the pressures of thirtysomething urban family life, where interest and affection is in permanent danger of being extinguished by the sheer stress of keeping going.

There's no point in criticising an author for writing about what he knows – Phil Whitaker turns out to be a police forensic doctor – but you get the feeling that his real forte is the modern domestic interior. Nevertheless, set against the heights achieved by his excellent second novel, Triangulation (1999), this comes to rest on a thoroughly respectable subsidiary rung.

D J Taylor's novel 'The Comedy Man' is now published in paperback by Duckbacks