From the lofty heights of darkness

The Gothic quickly became part of the strange world the fiction of novelist Patrick McGrath takes place in. The title of this characteristically atmospheric new book, which is also his heroine's name, immediately puts the reader in mind of an earlier master of the gothic grotesque, Mervyn Peake, creator of the Gormenghast trilogy. Interestingly however, the grotesque which dominates this book is not surreal, or fantastical, it is the result of a fire begun by accident and ending in tragedy. The rest of course, is caused by human misbehaviour.

Martha is the daughter of Harry, a huge man, drawn perhaps too obviously as a noble savage. As a small boy raised by his doomed mother, a collector of seaweed, the child grows up fast and wild, yet gains a love of reading. Years pass. After his life and body are ruined by the fire his carelessness caused, he assumes the role of penitent. His only companion is his daughter, Martha, a little girl determined to stay with her father. Should that all sound straightforward enough as human tragedies go, think again.

Few writers are more drawn than McGrath to the bizarre and even fewer as skilled at evoking it. Harry Peake's story is set against the wildness of an 18th-century England complete with dense fog, gloomy marshes and a taste for freaks. Hovering in the background from early on in the narrative is the excitement represented by an America eager for independence. The narrative is partly told by a narrator who discovers the tale through an ancient uncle who approaches the telling of it with shaky measures of obsession and reluctance. The old man's uneven method causes our narrator, Ambrose Tree who seems to have a great deal in common with Emily Bronte's Lockwood, including poor health, and an irritable temperament, to rely heavily on his own invention. Not that the task is beyond him, as he tells us he is something of a poet.

From the opening sentence, which announces, "it is a black art, the writing of history, is it not? - to resurrect the dead and animate their bones, as historians do? I think historians must be melancholy creatures, rather like poets, perhaps, or doctors; but then, what does it matter what I think? This is not my story."

Instead he stresses it is the story of a father and daughter, "and of the strange and terrible events that tore them apart. . . " The action begins with the narrator making his way across the "drear landscape" of the Lambeth Heath, summoned by his uncle who resides in a vast heap of a house that the narrator will, in time, inherit. That time appears to have arrived. But instead of being presented with a mansion, he gets a story.

As does McGrath's reader. Since the publication of his first novel The Grotesque in 1989 which followed an excellent volume of short stories, Blood and Water and Other Tales, McGrath has been viewed as a writer of immense Wildean originality and technical skill who is also blessed with a flair for sly humour - although the comedy has been less in evidence as his career has progressed through fascinating novels such as Spider (1990), Dr Haggard's Disease (1993) and Asylum (1996). This is his fifth novel, his longest and yet most dictated to by structure. There is an overwhelming inevitability about this book, the story is given and the outcome easy to guess. There are no twists because each turn of the plot is easily detected. The revolutionary theme is more incidental than dominant although it provides the setting for Martha's gesture of revolt. Yet the strength of the book lies in McGrath's immaculate prose and feel for the period.

Caught in a burning building, Harry's spine is smashed into several pieces. It is cleverly if agonisingly rebuilt. The operation leaves him a freak and this is significant, the once physically splendid Harry - with his echoes of Heathcliff and Hardy's Henchard - is a wreck humbled and guilty. He is also a drunk given to violent binges and during one such session destroys the only thing he has in the world, the love of his daughter. For all the betrayals and losses which take place, the novel never quite becomes a morality play.

If the book has a prevailing theme it is of fate on the rampage. That sense of inevitability already referred to which runs through the narrative is also matched by the narrator's mounting fever which appears to have been caused by curiosity as much as a chill caught crossing the marsh.

Harry's crosses, his ritual humiliation as a freak prepared to show his deformity for money and his loss of his daughter, fall far short of the powerful tragedy that surrounds his daughter. From an early age Martha is a prey for men, including her own father, and as McGrath cleverly presents her with a stroppy rather than passive personality, she emerges as a more feisty, and ultimately, tragic innocent than victim.

The story that the narrator pieces together is being told with the distance of time, some years have passed. McGrath evokes the density of distant past looking back even further in time. Just as the English sequences appear to take place in marshy dampness, crowded London streets, and developing industrialisation, the American sections have all the space of the New World.

McGrath's formal elegance and Old World prose ensures he is among the finest of British writers, a stylist drawn to psychological torment. Admittedly this is his least psychologically argued narrative to date, as the story unfolds more by detail and event, than by brooding personality shifts.

Martha Peake is a resounding celebration of story at its darkest. It is also the best British novel to appear so far this year. McGrath could have won the Booker with any of his previous novels, yet has never been short-listed.

This could well be a contender, although anyone hoping to win this year's Booker Prize, Ondaatje included, will have to produce a masterpiece if hoping to challenge Scots Canadian Alistair MacLeod's forthcoming magnificent family saga, No Great Mischief.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times