The day after losing his virginity with a black prostitute, James Kronk, a teenage South African, runs the fastest 100 metres in history by a white boy - a record that stands for a month - thus earning the nickname, White Lightning.
At the start of Justin Cartwright's beguiling new novel, the middle-aged Kronk is still running, figuratively now, trying to keep ahead of the guilt and the ghosts that threaten to drag him back. He has returned from the wreckage of his London life to be with his mother, who is dying in a small-town hospital on the coast of South Africa.
In London, his aspirations as a film director have been undermined by his passivity and the lack of judgment, which his ex-wife has told him is his biggest failing. While his career has deteriorated - soft-porn films, promos for timeshares destroyed by hurricanes, propaganda for political fanatics, interspersed with spells as a dispatch rider - his personal life is also in ruins.
His mother's impending death, with its promise of some inherited money, seems to offer a fresh chance of escape, of disengagement from the strife of family life, ambition, cities. But he has come to the wrong place; while the space and grandeur of the African landscape appear to represent freedom, his half-forgotten and rapidly changing former home is in the grip of historical forces even more overwhelming than those he has left behind.
The tone of Kronk's early ruminations establishes the conflicting characteristics that propel his story, past and present - arrogant and cynical at one moment, tender and gullible the next. His attitude to his rediscovered homeland reflects the same contradictions: at times, he takes a distant, almost anthropological view of its people and wildlife; at others, he is sucked into their stories, partly through a desire to make amends for his past failings. He is unprepared for the extent of the conflict sparked by his different relationships - with the black shanty family he befriends, with his poor white neighbours, and even with the baboon that he takes for walks in the mountains.
He begins to run again, past the expanding shanty towns on the coastline, and to surf in the giant waves. He makes plans to buy a small farm, begins an affair with a woman introduced to him by his solicitor, and toys with an idea for a film, to be called Surfing With Baboons.
As his heart expands in proportion to the magnificent landscape around him, the story seems to be turning into a tale of redemption, like a more humorous, less whimsical version of The Shipping News. In fact, though, it is in a harsher mould, nearer to Coetzee's Disgrace or the work of Camus, to whom Kronk often refers.
The echoes of Camus's Outsider can be heard from the first line. Instead of "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know", we have Cartwright's "I was waiting for my mother to die. I wasn't waiting with eagerness or curiosity or sadness - she was very old - but with a fullness of heart, as though into that tricky organ a lot of history and regret and deception had flooded". And as with Camus's Meursault on the opposite coast of Africa, Kronk's imperviousness to society's attitudes is doomed to be punished.
Within the expansive, pacy style, there is always the threat of unpleasant narrative surprises waiting to explode Kronk's reverie. Cartwright's structural trick of burying unexpected story twists like mines in the rolling landscape of description and reflection is one that is carried off expertly, never failing to surprise or move.
With this novel, Cartwright, a former Whitbread Award winner for Leading the Cheers, has put it all together - style, story, theme - to produce something exceptional.
Giles Newington is an Irish
Times journalist
Giles Newington
White Lightning. By Justin Cartwright. Sceptre, 248pp. £16.99 sterling