BOOK REVIEW / All that wavers is not gold: 'The High Flyer' - Nicholas Shakespeare: HarperCollins, 14.99

NICHOLAS Shakespeare's second novel is a frustrating mixture of tight focus and prolix digression. The central story, which explores the destructive potential of love, is handled with real delicacy. But it is buried among a distracting array of subplots and subordinate characters.

At 58, Thomas Wavery has spent his entire working life in the Foreign Office, and is confidently expecting to be rewarded for his diligence with his chosen post, the embassy at Lisbon. His marriage to Penny - who has come to terms with their childlessness by channelling her creative energies into a successful career as an artist - has lasted for 35 years. To the outside world, he seems a man in control of his life.

But he has fallen into the habit of avoiding looking at himself too closely - so much so that he has failed to notice how empty his marriage has become. His profession has taught him to suppress inconvenient emotions: 'Diplomatic life had been a continuous party at which he could not be himself . . . After years of not being himself, he was beginning to believe that was no self to be.'

Then, at a diplomatic drinks party, he meets Catharine, a married woman young enough to be his daughter, who reawakens his capacity to feel. Their love affair is brief and marked by a strange ambivalence on Catharine's part. But when, at the end of a clandestine trip, the couple are spotted embracing at the airport by a Foreign Office official, things begin to fall apart. Wavery is denied the Lisbon appointment on the grounds of suspected adultery. His wife, secretly relieved to find an excuse for ending the marriage, leaves him. Catharine now seems out of his reach.

Alone, Wavery finds himself en route to exile in Abyla, an obscure Spanish enclave opposite Gibralter where, as Consul General, he is expected to prepare for the royal visit which is due to mark the opening of a tunnel, now in construction, linking Europe with Africa. The novel opens with Wavery's arrival in Gibraltar (his earlier history is told as a series of flashbacks) where, in a bathetic scene symbolic of his professional humiliation and personal identity crisis, his passport is stolen by a barbary ape. In Abyla, surrounded by its highly coloured inhabitants, Wavery waits depressively for a message from Catharine and for the final, tragic denouement, which is as shocking as it is moving.

Taken on its own, Wavery's story has a lyric simplicity and an emotional subtlety that are moving, involving, and beautifully observed. But, almost strangled at times by a labyrinthine network of parallel plots, it forms only one thread of the narrative, which weaves its way in and out of the lives and past histories of Abyla's citizens. Where the Waverys and Catherine are rounded, the Abylans seem like a completely different species. Presented in a far more theatrical light, they hover on the edge of surrealism. The unusual profusion of minor characters is initially confusing - I found myself taking notes out of fear of forgetting who everyone was - but a handful stick out.

Genia, an over-dressed elderly Russian emigre, is preparing to return to her native country to reclaim the estate lost by her family in the Revolution. Zamora, leader of Abyla's opposition, president of the bullfight, and amateur scholar, is obsessed with his country's mythic past, though his fascination with Hercules is ironic in the light of his own political impotence. Marie Amaral, the florist, left her native Algeria during the war of independence, after her husband was murdered. Raped herself, she gave birth to Periclito, who has grown up enormously fat, despite training as a matador.

But the most enigmatic character is Joseph Silkleigh, an ex-patriate English deep-sea diver who spends his time propping up the bar in the Cafe Ulisse. Engaged in a never-ending search to find a title for his eternally unfinished memoirs, he is gossipy, uncouth and suspected of drug-smuggling, though his real vocation - as a secret agent in the pay of the British - isn't revealed till the end. Yet Silkleigh the spy isn't half so compelling as the less exotic Foreign Office officials with whom Wavery has dealings - like the odious Queesal, who has the diplomatic knack of making an insult all the more humiliating by phrasing it as a compliment.

The High Flyer is an over-crowded novel - there's enough material here for three or four books - and its sophisticated narrative technique is in constant danger of collapsing into fragmentation. Yet Wavery's story is just quiet and compelling enough to withstand the dissipations of the plot.