Brief lapse and purging ritual : BOOKS : FICTION

A MAP OF THE WORLD by Jane Hamilton, Doubleday £14.99

"THERE was fear and danger in everything and it was a wonder we weren't all paralysed by the possibility of death," mused Jane Hamilton's beleaguered heroine Alice Goodwin (do the good win?), with plenty of nightmarish reason. There she had been, fashioning an idyllic life with her solid husband Howard as the last family farmers in the American midwest, while tract houses sprouted boringly round their 400 acres. They had a herd of Golden Guernseys to keep them nearly financially solvent, and two little daughters to delight and exasperate them. Even if the neighbours thought them rather hippyish and tut-tutted at their dreadlocked farmhand, what did they care?

Then came the first false step in a stupendous fall from grace. Alice was babysitting her best friend Theresa's little daughters with her own, when a brief lapse of attention - the perusal of a map of the world she'd invented in childhood to distract herself from her own mother's death - had left her youngest charge at liberty to trip down to the big pond and unthinkable peril.

From this moment, Hamilton has the reader in her grip. Anguished Alice speeds to the pond, sees that little bottom bobbing on the surface, heaves herself to the rescue like Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now and, though she is a nurse, bungles the resuscitation. Her best friend's child dies.

The merciless locals are doing their worst to magnify Alice's already unfathomable guilt when another bombshell drops. A six-year-old boy at the school where Alice nurses accuses her of sexual abuse, and a judge finds probable cause to take her into custody. Husband and daughters are devastated; husband and parents sanctimoniously and blindly back the child. This most explosive of issues is well served here by some fresh thinking, excellent prose and edgy courtroom drama - although whether a six-year-old could actually be badgered by a defence lawyer to this extent leaves some room for doubt.

Where Jane Hamilton has triumphed above all is in creating robust, credible and winning characters. Wronged Alice may be a tragic heroine, but she is also a fount of off-beat one-liners, hyperbole and wry commentary. She sees her daughter Emma in the midst of a tantrum as "carrying on as if she was preparing for the role of Helen Keller", or a red-haired teacher looking "as if he bathed compulsively in carrot juice". Indeed, if Alice had had a little more control of her immoderate asides, she would havegiven less ammunition to the prosecution.

Theresa is there to demonstrate the extra- ordinary healing properties of forgiveness, and to define the social dynamics: "Alice is actually in jail because the community is going through a purging ritual," she observes. Howard, who narrates a middle section between Alice's two, is the strong, whiffy man of the soil, fundamentally decent but believably capable of his own lapses of faith and fidelity. The little girls are carefully depicted trying to grow up fast in their mother's absence, having a go atpracticality: "If she couldn't ever come home, ever ever," postulates Emma, "could we go live with Theresa for part of the time so we could be with a lady?"

There are a few longueurs in the third section before we hit the courtroom finish, but taken as a whole this is a fine achievement - deeply moral without being didactic, wrenching but seasoned with the odd unexpected welcome hilarity.