BOOK REVIEW / A couple of ageing pawns caught up in a new game: 'Occam's Razor' - Maureen Duffy: Sinclair Stevenson, 14.99 pounds

TWO OLD men meet to play chess every Friday evening. One is Italian, Orazio, one is Irish, Pearse. Despite years spent in this way, they know nothing about each other, until parallel threats to their children thrust them out of their reticent routine and into a joint conspiracy. Pearse's son, whom he has not seen for 13 years, is being tracked by the IRA: Orazio is commanded by the mafia to launder money through the restaurant now run by his daughter.

Occam's Razor offers a strange, sometimes uneasy contrast between the plot of a thriller and an often reflective content. The choice parts of the book are those that deal with the internal dialogue of the two men as they confront their suddenly changed lives. Less necessary are the long soliloquies from their respective son and daughter, which side-step away from the action to fill out the background. The two old men, particularly the Italian, are so compellingly drawn that their children tend to fall away into the shadows, despite their taking, in turn, a first-person narrative voice. This frequent change of viewpoint and language tends to disturb the flow of the book, and is not sufficiently bedded into the narrative to be convincing - the characters of Agnese and Liam never develop outside their set pieces.

In compensation, Maureen Duffy succeeds in taking both Pearse and Orazio across considerable distances. They look, as for the first time, at their lives, their own bodies. Pearse 'hated his elderly feet with the warpings and abrasions of a lifetime', Orazio sees a 'destitute, ageing self' in the mirror. The presence of danger provokes clarity, and a revisitation of the past. There is a brief, poignant moment as Pearse realises small truths about his deceased, but can make no amends: there was nothing he could make of this sudden knowledge. It was all too late.'

A phrase from Horace, the Italian's namesake, runs through the book: Non sum qualis eram - I'm not the man I was. Both men must re-evaluate themselves: danger is a threat but also a liberation. 'Suddenly he felt invigorated. There was something to do.' These two old men discover new possibilities, stimulated by their game of hide and seek. Pearse becomes an expert at changing buses and tubes to avoid pursuers, Orazio transforms his elegant self into a down-and-out to camouflage himself among London's homeless, looking for Pearse's son. A reticent, controlled man, his metamorphosis revitalises him: 'What he saw wasn't someone else, only himself set free.'

Maureen Duffy explores a London thrown into relief through the newly opened eyes of her characters, both still immigrants despite years of residence. Orazio's exploration of the underbelly of the city is one of the most memorable passages in the book. He becomes aware of recession-hit London, haunted by rent boys and the homeless. At first he is alarmed, but ultimately undergoes a true rite of passage - he becomes obsessed by the face of a young man he sees sleeping rough and his unexpressed erotic self threatens to over-rule him: 'All his life since the war he had lived quietly, respectably. Now through no choice or fault of his own he had been forced over the edge.'

Present action is generally dealt with in these brief phrases, and the dialogue is clean and sparse. But the remembered parts get their feet stuck every now and again in abundant, overblown sentences that build clause upon clause beyond the point of no return. The irony is that the razor of the title is there as a symbol of pared-down essentials - a challenge to do away with superfluity. So far as this novel is concerned, it is a valid, but occasionally overambitious, idea.