A new take on the Troubles

Fiction:Anna Burns was born in Belfast in 1962, but - as the dustjacket of Little Constructions proudly declares - moved to London in 1987.

Despite this, she has turned consistently to the North for literary inspiration, and her first novel, No Bones - the critically-acclaimed story of a schoolgirl growing up during the Troubles - was nominated for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel extends these parameters by exploring the emotional damage those Troubles have wrought.

But this is not just another Troubles novel. Burns warns that "one man's surrealism is another man's reality here", and readers would do well to remember this when attempting to comprehend the anarchic ways of the fictional town of Tiptoe Floorboard. The violently insane Doe family - John, Jetty, Jotty, JimmyJudges, JanineJuliaJoshuatine, and others - are the town's "biggest cheeses", calculating killers responsible for murder, incest and abuse. A highly detailed and often convoluted family story follows, in which Burns demonstrates her central theme - the dehumanising effects of violence.

As the novel progresses, it is the victims - above all the female victims - who come to the fore. As Burns explains about another Doe, Janet: "She's still in the jail section of the mental hospital . . . whilst the men who did everything are now famous and iconic." Despite the misogynistic attitudes of the men of Tiptoe Floorboard - "Why can't women be gun shops?" - it is the women who ultimately triumph, their symbolic victory the transformation of the town's best gun shop into a bra shop.

Burns delights in the novel's potential for black humour, and sends up Troubles cliches with abandon. The town is terrorised by a Kalashnikov-wielding woman, its community centres act as fronts for criminal gangs, and a shadowy paramilitary organisation lurks in the background. Torturers take breaks to boil kettles and trade ghost stories, Ouija boards are used to identity informers, and the Doe clan's leader, John, is the proud owner of a pet raven - a "souvenir" from the Tower of London.

At the heart of the novel lies a belief that the Troubles were little more than criminal activity by atavistic elements - "All crimes in such places got connected with the war" - and the author echoes Burke's admonition that evil flourishes when good men do nothing: "A person could step in and shout, 'Stop this!'" Whatever the merits of such an assessment, its simplicity is not reflected in the first-person narrative, which all too often is disjointed, tangential, and difficult to comprehend. As a result, a device intended to mirror the anarchy and uncertainty of civil strife has produced a novel that is, sadly, less than the sum of its many parts.

Freya McClements is a writer and journalist

Little Constructions By Anna Burns Fourth Estate, 296pp. £14.99