A watching and waiting game

Fiction: Men go to war, women wait. The theme is as old as literature. Homer's Penelope waited. Vera, the shadowy heroine in Andreï Makine's ninth novel, has kept vigil for more than 30 years.

She was only 16 when her lover, a soldier, went to fight in the second World War. He never returned. But she has made herself useful. Although solitary and loyal, she has made herself useful by tending the old, forgotten widows in her village community. She has been their nurse and, in time, their chief mourner - she has even buried them. Meanwhile, the locals watch her; she has become a mythic figure, there is no pity, only admiration.

The narrator is a young man, something of a scholar, who has arrived from Leningrad to study local customs. His romantic imagination becomes fascinated by Vera's tragedy. Makine, the Siberian writer whose literary career is itself a romance (he abandoned his native country and settled in exile in France, and writes in French), has perfected an elegiac voice. Since the publication of his fourth novel, Le Testament Français, which won the Prix Goncourt, and on its publication in English alerted a wider audience to a writer possessed of subtle genius, he has written a dazzling sequence of graceful narratives which are both gentle and barbed, eloquent in their study of regret.

The displacement caused by war is his theme and he is a consummate watcher, a witness who records the suffering of the lonely, the sorrow of those who mourn. "She is a woman palpably meant for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being)," begins the narrative, and the narrator continues, "and yet casually, it seems, she has chosen solitude, loyalty to an absent one, a refusal to love . . ." It sounds odd, even clinical.

But it is deliberate. Makine's narrator shares the reader's unease. He is ashamed of his presumption. "This is the sentence I wrote down at that crucial moment when we believe we have another person's measure (this woman, Vera's). Up to that point all is curiosity, guesswork, a hankering after confessions . . . But once their secret has been decoded, along come these words, often pretentious and dogmatic, dissecting, pinpointing, categorizing."

In many ways this is a book about speculation. The dynamic is less the tragedy of Vera's girlhood romance transformed into a lifetime of waiting for nothing, effectively her paying for a brief happiness, as it is an account of the narrator's unpleasant discovery of his true self. As an educated outsider, the narrator is well-treated in the village. He is openly accepted, everything is opened to him, he is seen to have come from the great city, Leningrad, and is given full access to the small rituals of a place in which the locals live in a time warp.

A sense of guilt shrouds the narrative. Makine has a special feel for atmosphere, his sense of history, most particularly that of his country's dramatic past, caught as it is between romance and squalor, is pitch perfect, even if the dialogue is frequently leaden.

Although Makine is looking at the impact of history on an individual life as clearly here as he has done in his previous fictions, The Woman Who Waited never achieves the force of A Hero's Daughter, his first novel, which was belatedly published in English after he was internationally celebrated. That first novel is rooted in post-second World War Russia, as is this often awkwardly earthy one. But The Woman Who Waited does not quite engage like that first book, or as all of his subsequent superb fiction, because the essential thesis is reduced to the narrator choosing to examine Vera as an interesting specimen, who intrigues him because her fledgling sexual life ended when her soldier went to war.

Yet Makine does stress his narrator's disappointment with his own responses.

The narrative is heavy with the knowledge of hindsight. The narrator is looking back to himself as a young man confident of his reading of any situation. What becomes obvious is his own awareness that at the time when he was confidently piecing together the facts of Vera's life, he had had little experience of his own from which to draw. Little is revealed about the narrator, while Vera is presented as a powerful physical force, tall and strong, striding about - rowing to an island burial place, able to assist and carry the old. When he sees her through the trees he places her in a sexual context; she is in fact hauling in a net of fish.

Vera keeps vigil, but she is also very active. She teaches at a school some miles from the village. The narrator's younger self can not understand a woman who may have chosen not to forget, but who has not lain down and died either. Her dilemma becomes his bewilderment. The narrative develops into the narrator's far smaller waiting game, that of will he lure her into bed?

Ultimately, Vera is a shadowy heroine - too vaguely presented to be fully sympathetic. If her tragedy is that of having lost her lover to war, her crime appears to be a simple one - that of growing older. Instead of attempting to explore Vera's feelings, the narrator, as expected, discovers far more about himself. As ever, Makine, one of Europe's finest living writers, draws on his instinctive reading of character. The narrator makes a familiar error: he assumes he knows more than he does. Most of all, he underestimates Vera's intelligence and grasp of life's realities.

The beauty of Makine's delicate lyric prose more than compensates for the narrowness of the tale which shifts and shimmers through several moods. In itself, the very narrowness of the narrator's youthful fervour ensure the book rings true and articulates exactly the misreading that Makine has set out to chronicle.

The Woman Who Waited By Andrei Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan, Sceptre, 182pp, £12.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times