Voyage to the End of the Room Tibor Fischer Chatto & Windus, 251pp, £10.99 ISBN 0701173335

Tibor Fischer first came to notice when he was Booker shortlisted for his debut, Under the Frog, and last came to notice for the unilateral rage he vented about Martin Amis's latest, Yellow Dog. The second point is the most relevant here - this is one angry mutha of a novelist, with one angry mutha of a narrator, and a number of characters whose principal purpose, it seems, is to spur and justify the angry mood.

The book opens in London in the well-appointed flat of Oceane, a former dancer turned recluse. She won't leave her house for anyone; she makes vague claims that friends are visiting, but we don't meet them. The tedium is leavened mainly by a "travel agent" who arranges themed evenings when foreigners come round and describe their homelands. As con-ceits go, this was probably better in the conception than in the execution. Our heroine lacks the textured interior life to spend this much time within the same four walls. While her irritation is described with (I believe the phrase is) verbal pyrotechnics, it remains just that - irritation.

She is annoyed by crackheads, burglars and car-thieves. The Millennium Bridge infuriates her, as do most men, prices, the late payment of irrelevantly small fees (she is a freelance designer) and all neighbours. Considering that she never leaves the house, her contact with most of these abominable nuisances is theoretical, which gives her the air of a grumpy pensioner even though she is in her early thirties.

In one rather extraordinary personal epiphany, the nature of evil reveals itself to her in the behaviour of a drug addict who rings on her doorbell at 4.30 in the morning: "I acknowledge that it's remarkably easy to mess up your life. One moment of carelessness or even no moment of carelessness and you're stuffed. But I have to say that I hate these women for the reason that they are pure evil . . . Pure evil is not caring about anything but yourself, even if its effects are sometimes as undramatic as merely ruining someone's sleep."

We're waggling around a big concept in a very conversational way - to believe in "pure" evil at all, one has to believe that it's innate, rather than the cumulative result of circumstance (which carries within it the possibility of redemption). So, logically, it's a tricky label to fix to a crackhead. And besides, if the crackhead really were pure evil, she wouldn't have disturbed Oceane's sleep for a fiver: she would have stabbed her in the neck and moved into her posh flat. Whatever - this concept of "consideration", and how nice it would be if everyone had more of it, is not grand or sturdy enough to underpin this book.

The obvious comparison here is with Richard Tull, Amis's angry hero of The Information - all the same catalysts are in place (noxious fellow city-dwellers with no consideration). And yet, in that character, we had self-parody; there was a lightly mocking interplay between author and narrator; there was, to put it bluntly, a bit of humour. There is very little humour in the mental processes of Oceane. I suspect this is one of the casualties of having a female narrator (though, as heroines go, she is much more credibly female than anything Fischer's contemporaries have come up with lately - Nick Hornby, say).

Blessedly, a flashback occurs and we're in Barcelona, slipping on Oceane's (erotic) dancing shoes. Strangely, even though truly bad things are going down in the strip club (people keep getting murdered), Oceane is in a much better mood. Fischer's writerly skill is out in force in Barcelona: he describes the whole spectrum of sex, from the fake ecstatic writhing of the floor show to the far less graceful business of real-life lust, and he does it with enormous boldness and likeable perspicacity. As a reader, you want to stay in Barcelona for the rest of the book but unfortunately people keep getting killed, Oceane gets bored, and a debt-collector called Audley is on his way to Yugoslavia, which makes the novel sound more political than it is.

Where Oceane is consistently cross, Audley is wilfully unpredictable. You can never quite work out why he's ended up wherever he's ended up (except when he's under instruction from Oceane). He is also a misanthropist but seems ready to be persuaded otherwise. He gets into a lot of scrapes, many of them amusing ones.

Anyway, there's a lady, and a man, and the only other important protagonist (Oceane's ex) is dead, so you can probably guess the rest. This is far more interesting than your average modern "love" story, and ranges confidently between a very large number of topics, small and large. It's good - it just isn't as good as it could have been. Whether this is why Fischer's in a really bad mood, it's impossible to say.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian

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